Playing by Different Rules

One summer break during college,
I worked at a Christian camp. The fourth-grade
girls I cared for couldn’t get
enough kickball, playing nonstop in the
blazing sun for three hours every day.
When it was time for a water break, they
gulped down their drinks and dashed
back to play. I, on the other hand, was
more interested in taking a long nap.
The constant activity wore me out.

One day as I rested under the shade
of a tree watching the kids play, I
reminisced about how I once had the
same energy and carefree attitude.
Then it hit me. God intentionally made
kids very different from adults.

Kids are typically lighthearted, energetic, unaware of
time, and amused by the smallest thing. In contrast, adults
worry constantly, lack energy, watch the clock, and find it
difficult to laugh about simple things. It’s not hard to see
how differently kids act and think. Even Scripture acknowledges
a clear distinction. “When I was a child, I spoke like a
child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I
became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11).

Far from shortcomings,
the differences
in kids are by design,
appropriate to
their stages in life.

Far from shortcomings, these differences are by design,
appropriate to their stages in life. According to the Old
Testament, children are “fearfully and wonderfully made”
(Psalm 139:13–16) and a “heritage from the Lord” (Psalm
127:3). They are special in their own right. Said another way,
God made all of us cool kids from the start. Modern research
is just now beginning to uncover how children can perform
feats grown-ups can only dream about.

Let’s Start with Babies

If we’re going to talk about cool kids,
we need to start with babies. We all
were once tiny, squirmy humans who
filled our diapers, cried, and fought
sleep. Through those many long nights,
our parents probably didn’t realize that
something special was going on inside
our brains.

Researchers have been studying
babies for decades to discover their
secrets. It appears their brains really
do work differently from ours. Experts
in artificial intelligence (AI) are taking
a closer look too. If they could
design a computer that mimics a baby’s
brain, perhaps it could make intuitive
leaps that modern binary computers
never could.

Deb Roy and his wife Rupal Patel
aren’t your run-of-the-mill parents. Deb
(yes, it’s a common guy’s name in India) is an AI and robotics expert at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT),
and Rupal is a well-known speech and
language specialist at Northwestern
University. Before they had children,
Deb boasted to his wife that his latest
robot—with his innovative image-recognition
software—could learn just like
a child, simply by watching videos and
connecting objects to sounds.

As soon as they brought their son
home in 2005, they commenced the
Human Speechome Project, gathering
surveillance videos that Deb could
feed to his robot. For 3 years, he collected
over 90,000 hours of video and
140,000 hours of audio.

Where is all this footage now? It’s
collecting dust in the couple’s basement.
Here’s why: Deb, the mastermind
behind the project, realized a
traditional robot could never match the
intelligence of his son.

Deb first realized he was in trouble
the day his son tried to say an actual
word. Following his father’s gaze, the
boy looked directly at a picture of a fish
and said, “Fah.” He then looked at his
father with a knowing look, confirming
that he got it right. “He’s not even
a year old,” Deb acknowledged, “but
there’s a conscious being.”

That day, Deb accepted that no matter
how hard he tried to give it human
qualities, his robot could only mimic
the most superficial aspects of a
child’s intelligence. A child learns in a
continuous, conscious way, observing
the world and comparing it to feedback
from his parents and other conscious
beings around him.

AI leaders in this new research suspect
that babies benefit from running
two mental processes at the same
time. They are born with a powerful
set of basic logical concepts and wiring
to begin running these “rules,”
which help them crunch the numbers
as they gather tons of data from the
world around them.

Computers, on the other hand, just
do number crunching. For example,
if babies see a dachshund for the first
time, they instantly know it seems to
be a “dog” even if all they’ve known
was their family’s St. Bernard. Computers,
however, must compare tens of
thousands of dogs to extract the basic
traits that define a dog.

AI researchers have started several
initiatives worth hundreds of millions
of dollars to explore the possibilities of
a new kind of computing, such as a $125
million effort by the Allen Institute for
Artificial Intelligence. MIT psychologist
Josh Tenenbaum told Science, “We’re
trying to take one of the oldest dreams
of AI seriously: that you could build a
machine that grows into intelligence
the way a human does—that starts like
a baby and learns like a child.”

Indeed, we now know that babies
begin learning inside the womb, long
before their first cries. A new study suggests
that when babies kick in utero,
they are already constructing a brain
network to understand which part of
their body is moving. They use this
framework to begin putting together
the streaming data from their ever-changing
world into a coherent picture.

A Different Body Plan

Adults are taller, children are
shorter. Adults are stronger,
children are weaker. It’s
easy to notice the obvious
differences, but have you
ever stopped to think about
the subtler ones? Turns out,
God designed kids with many
surprising differences.

Taste Buds

Children are born
with 10,000 taste
buds, double the
number in adults.
Babies are born
preferring sweet-tasting
food, the
flavor of mother’s
milk with lots of
glucose needed for
growth. As their
taste buds lose
sensitivity with age,
kids can tolerate
bitter tastes like
brussels sprouts.

Weight Loss

Due to high
physical activity,
children often
have a higher
metabolic rate
(rate of burning
calories). They also
have more “brown”
fat that is good at
burning calories to
produce heat.

Rapid Learning

A baby’s brain is
constantly soaking
up new information.
Starting with 100
billion neurons (as
many as adults have)
it constantly adds
new connections
(synapses). By age
one, the number of
synapses peaks and
then decreases as
the brain purges the
weaker connections.

Hearing

Kids can detect
sounds at higher
and lower frequencies
than adults. Babies
can also listen to
all frequencies
simultaneously.
Eventually, they learn
to focus on what is
pertinent (like the
friendly adult in a
crowd offering candy).

Larger Body Surface Area

The ratio of skin to
size is much larger
for kids, so they cool
down faster. That’s
why kids can catch
a chill or dehydrate
when adults feel fine.

Babies also learn to recognize individual
voices in utero. Within one
hour after birth, they can distinguish
familiar voices (like mom’s) that
they’ve been listening to in the womb.
The Bible records just how smart
babies are: John the Baptist leapt in his
mother’s womb when he heard Mary’s
greeting (Luke 1:41). Our Creator
makes sure even the tiniest humans
can learn about him. His concern for
babies reminds us how much he values
human life at every stage—and how
cool kids really are.

Wired Differently

Can you imagine going back to kindergarten?
Sitting at a desk all day,
cutting out shapes with craft scissors,
and gluing macaroni to construction
paper. There’s a reason this sounds
like torture. Kids learn differently
than adults. They need lots of repetition
and experimentation.

Yet they’re really good at learning.
Children are wired to record and connect
loads of information automatically
without consciously thinking
about it. And it sticks.

In a 2017 report, researchers at The
Ohio State University showed 35 adults
and 34 four- and five-year-olds a computer
screen with two overlapping
shapes. The participants were asked to
pay attention to one shape each time
the screen changed. While the adults
observed the changes in the one shape
they were focusing on, they missed the
changes in the other shape. The children,
on the other hand, noticed the
changes in both shapes. Their inability
to stay focused on just one thing and
collect lots of information at once was
a strength in this instance.

Vladimir Sloutsky, coauthor of the
study, explained, “The point is that
children don’t focus their attention as
well as adults, even if you ask them to.
The ability to focus attention is what
allows adults to sit in two-hour meetings
and maintain long conversations
while ignoring distractions. But young
children’s use of distributed attention
allows them to learn more in new and
unfamiliar settings by taking in a lot
of information.” Perhaps this is why
even the slightest prompting can help
you recall a nursery rhyme you learned
as a kid.

Even learning a new language is easy
for children. They don’t have to work at
it like we do. The millions of brain cells responsible for their
speech continuously create new circuits before age 10. But
once children complete puberty, their brain functions differently.
That’s why it’s harder for you to learn a new language.
One study at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri,
confirmed that our brains reorganize themselves as we age.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. If you put a child and an
adult in the same room with a cardboard box and ask them
to decide how to use the box, the adult would think of practical
uses for the box. But a child would see the box as their
next spaceship or race car or whatever they could imagine.
Until a certain age, children can’t distinguish the difference
between fantasy and reality; in turn, they are unable
to quickly distinguish between true and false information.
Perhaps this is why Jesus so adamantly condemned anyone
who would offend or lead a child astray (Luke 17:2). He knew
they were susceptible to being manipulated and incapable of
logical judgment. As we age, our brain continues to grow and
mature. If the Creator hadn’t designed us to grow, we might
still enjoy finger painting every day.

Endless Supply of Energy

All this “mapping of the world” and building a mental
library from scratch takes energy—lots of it. A healthy child
is a busy child, filling his days with rich experiences. And
God has that need for speed covered too.

If you’ve spent any time with kids, you’ve noticed that
they never seem to run out of energy. Ongoing research
shows that their endurance rivals that of top athletes. Let’s
pause here for a moment. Bo Jackson, former NFL running
back, once ran 40 yards in 4.13 seconds. Sound impressive? It
also sounds quite exhausting. It takes a long time for adults
to recuperate before their next run. But kids have more
energy and resilience than world-class athletes!

To test this point, researchers at a French university gathered
12 children between the ages of nine and eleven, 12
untrained men, and 13 male athletes. Everyone was asked
to complete two 7-second sprints that included a 1-minute
recovery time. While the adults, including the trained athletes,
needed extra rest time, the kids were ready to continue
almost immediately.

Kids need a proper diet and exercise to stay fit, but the
Creator gave them an advantage. He designed children’s bodies
to use muscles and burn fat differently from adults. We
have two basic kinds of muscle fibers, one for long-term, low-intensity
activities like jogging (type I), and one for short-term,
high-intensity activities like sprinting (type II). It gets
complicated, but kids basically use the low-intensity muscles
to do most of the work, including high-intensity activity like
sprinting. So the brain doesn’t register fatigue like it does for
adults. Kids can pick up their kickball and dash around the
bases another time with little rest in between.

Their metabolism also follows different rules. Adult bodies
have a way to get energy for normal, everyday activities
like jogging (aerobic metabolism) and another way to insert
extra energy for the short-term like sprinting (anaerobic
metabolism). Kids rely more on the aerobic metabolism for
both everyday tasks and special tasks. Consequentially,
they never seem to get tired.

A Considerate Creator

Our Creator makes
sure even the tiniest
humans can learn
about him. His concern
for babies reminds us
how much he values
human life at every
stage—and how cool
kids really are.

In the New Testament, some parents
brought their children to Jesus so
he could pray for them. The disciples
tried to turn them away, but Scripture
says Jesus was “indignant” and said,
“Let the children come to me; do not
hinder them, for to such belongs the
kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you,
whoever does not receive the kingdom
of God like a child shall not enter
it” (Mark 10:14–15). During Jesus’
time, children weren’t seen as equals.
The disciples thought Jesus shouldn’t
be troubled with children, since they
weren’t worthy of his time. But Jesus
accepted them with loving arms.

Christ was, after all, their Creator.
He made them in a special way
because he loved them and knew their
needs and wanted to meet them. Jesus
knew we all have something to learn
from children. In fact, his kingdom
belongs to those who have the best
qualities of children (Matthew 19:14).
They are lighthearted, trusting, and
energetic. The same Creator who supplies
each child’s needs also provided
adults with everything they need to
enjoy an abundant life, which begins
with simple childlike faith in their
Creator and Redeemer.

SourceThis article originally appeared on answersingenesis.org

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