Having two children pulled out of my uterus seemed barbaric, but I kissed their goopy heads all the same. Once they were clean, sleeping, and smelling of milk and the doctors had put me back together again, I thought\u00a0the barbarity was over and that we were on our way to becoming civilized. Silly me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just spent the last three years trying to make something human out of these two. As twins go, they could be a species unto themselves. They\u2019ve got their own language, manner of dress, favorite haunts, feeding times, and nocturnal habits. They even groom each other if a particularly enticing booger is stuck in the other\u2019s hair.\u00a0However, it\u2019s not the twin thing that sets them apart from the rest of humanity, it\u2019s the toddler thing. Toddlerhood is the jumping-off point for children\u00a0as they begin to use reason, even as it disables our own.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Any parent of a toddler becomes a sociologist for a time, if only to ask: what am I doing here and how do we all get out alive? In his book \u201cA Natural History of Human Thinking<\/a>,\u201d psychologist Michael Tomasello argues that children in this early stage of cognition finally begin to deviate from their natural similarities with the chimpanzees, meaning less poop throwing and more conversing. In early infancy, children and apes aren\u2019t all that dissimilar in their physical and communication milestones. They develop different cries and learn to move and self-feed at comparable rates. It\u2019s not until the toddler-phase that kids begin to participate in \u201cshared intentionality.\u201d As Tomasello puts it<\/a>, this \u201c\u2018we\u2019 intentionality, refers to collaborative interactions in which participants share psychological states with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Basically, this is the age that kids begin to learn to work together for the benefit of the group. They begin to intuit and to show signs of sympathy \u2013 all the things they need to prove they\u2019re not little sociopaths, or apes. As an inherently competitive and autonomous species, chimpanzees do not feel the need to cooperate in the same way. But we humans need each other. Cavemen hunted better together. The colonists couldn\u2019t have survived New England winters without creating a solid collective. Thriving in the modern world means possessing the ability to express oneself in a manner the rest of society can understand.<\/p>\n

I can see glimpses of this in my own kids, albeit at a painstakingly slow pace. I see it when they team up to climb the pantry shelves to get the jelly beans. I see it when they look to each other before explaining what happened to the now-beheaded flowers in the yard. I see it when they help each other unbuckle their car seats on the highway. They\u2019re learning to work together and often to my downfall. However\u00a0I also see it when they help each other strap on their bike helmets, introduce themselves to other\u00a0kids on the playground, and Velcro each other\u2019s shoes. We\u2019re getting the good stuff too.<\/p>\n

A chimp will steal the banana right out of your hands if you let him. So will my children, but they might also decide to share. That\u2019s a step in the right direction. As they are now, they\u2019re only starting the path to full-blown rational adulthood. They\u2019ve just begun to diverge from the monkeys. The little glimmers of lucidity tell me that the signs are there, and they are enough to keep me pushing forward \u2013 at least enough to keep me from leaving them at the zoo.<\/p>\n

*Linking up with\u00a0Amanda<\/a>. This article originally appeared on Parent.co.<\/a><\/p>\n

What’s your craziest kid story (about you or your own kids)?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Save<\/span><\/p>\n

Save<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having two children pulled out of my uterus seemed barbaric, but I kissed their goopy heads all the same. Once they were clean, sleeping, and smelling of milk and the doctors had put me back together again, I thought\u00a0the barbarity was over and that we were on our way to becoming civilized. Silly me. I\u2019ve just spent the last three years trying to make something human out of these two. As twins go, they could …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86,26],"tags":[39,97,46,74,209,55,136,16,63,54,84,273,259,29],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mom-gene.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/monkeys-768641_1920.jpg?fit=1920%2C1271&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ca5p-KL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3307,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions\/3307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}