Finally, they’ve come up with an explanation for toddler behavior… sort of. A recent study out of Colorado has found that all those times you thought your toddler wasn’t listening to you doesn’t necessarily mean that they were ignoring you, but instead might have been unable to grasp what you were trying to say.

It seems that until a certain age, children are not as adept at following our instructions because it may not be as easy for them to understand and anticipate the consequences without some tangible frame of reference. In other words, they might have to actually experience the event in question before they understand where your advice is coming from.

In the study, researchers observed children in two age groups (three and a half and eight) and measured how they responded to certain visual cues in lieu of specific information that they were given beforehand. What they found was that eight-year-olds were more like adults in that they could take previous knowledge as a guiding basis for their decisions, anticipating a consequence and acting accordingly. Toddlers, on the other hand, were not necessarily able to make this connection, and needed to experience the event in order to make the appropriate choice after the fact.

The article, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), was a bit esoteric and even a bit over my head, but from what I could gather, the take home message was that for all of our efforts to enlighten our kids and guide them along the proper path, experience, in the end, is still the best teacher.

The example used in the story was trying to get a toddler to wear his or her coat when it’s cold outside. Despite repeated efforts to get them to understand, sometimes it requires that they actually learn for themselves that it’s cold outside before they can do the right thing and bundle up.

Besides, when you really get down to it, it’s probably hard for a young child to really grasp the concept of consequences, especially if they’ve been sheltered from them all along. Experiencing them firsthand has an uncanny way of making them not only crystal clear, but memorable, as well

And maybe that’s the way it should be. After all, life shouldn’t be an exercise in pedantry. It should be lived, embracing both the good and the bad, and hopefully learning from the experience. In the modern era of parenting, however, our children’s upbringing seems to be more a function of the advice of the supposed experts (who is raising their kids, anyway?) designed to expose us only to the good things while avoiding, at all costs, the bad. As everyone knows, life just doesn’t work out that way.

Even still, in the hyper-informed environment that we live in, over-involvement has become the norm, and in the long run this may not be the best thing for our children, who, as long as they are happy and healthy, need to stumble and (gasp!) fail now and then. As a parent, this may be difficult to witness, but it is from these moments that they will learn the important lessons that will go a long way towards making them stronger, more independent people.

And in the end, isn’t that what parenthood is all about?