You Done Well, Whale: Grandparents and the Age of Reason

You Done Well, Whale: Grandparents and the Age of Reason.

After a barbeque one night, while the crickets were providing us a symphony in the Box Elder trees, and the sun was spreading itself over the Wellsville Range, one of our daughters, Willow, grandson Carlton, and I stayed behind in our folding chairs while the others hauled away dishes.

We live on a moderately-sized piece of property, large enough that it takes our oldest grandson forty-seven seconds to run around the house at his top speed. Carlton was preparing for his First Communion and First Penance, both things that seemed foreign to him.1 But he knew what was expected, as the oldest, to set an example for his younger sibling.

None of our previous activities—ping pong, soccer, croquet, chase, or hide-and-go-seek (besides preparing the dinner)—seemed attractive at this point; we were tuckered out and didn’t mind leaving the clean-up to others.

On a whim, I asked Carlton, “Let’s say you were playing a ballgame with your friends, maybe four-square, or volleyball, and a classmate comes up and asks if she can play, too. Would you give up your place up to her?”

His parents, devout Catholics, take his faith formation seriously. They are sending their kids to Catholic school in Minnesota; they provide good role models regarding speech, manners, and generous use of their free time. But they don’t necessarily discuss controversial issues at the family dinner table.

Carlton’s gaze turned inward and his face darkened. “No,” he said, irritated.

“You would let her go away sad?” I pressed. Willow’s eyebrows raised.

“She could wait for us to finish,” Carlton said. “And there are other games happening.”

“That’s one solution…” I said.

“Tell me another one,” Carlton said.

“What do you mean?”

“Another story like that.”

All around us the chill from the ravine circulated, tickling our skin, but I persisted. “Ok, well, let’s say it was your mother’s birthday, and you didn’t have a present for her, but on your way home from school you saw some pretty flowers in your neighbor’s yard, would you pick them for her?”

“I would have to ask first,” he said.

 “What if your neighbor was a grumpy neighbor?”

“I could go into our yard to get flowers or into a field. Tell me another one.”

I looked over at Willow, who smiled. “You got this one, Grammie,” she said. This is your game, her face said.

“Ok,” I began, rubbing my shoulders. “Let’s say your mom asked you to take all the trash in the house to the big can outside, and you said you would, but you got distracted with your new building set and you forgot. Then, your mom ran into your little sister (if you had a little sister) and asked her to take the trash out, and your sister said, ‘No, I can’t. I’m playing with the cat,” but later she changed her mind, and took out the trash. Which one of you did what your mother asked?”

I was referencing Matthew 21, the Gospel for the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time 2023, when Jesus speaks to the crowd about a man who makes a request to his two sons. I didn’t know if Calvin had heard the homily on that reading, but he got the gist.

“The sister,” Carlton said unenthusiastically.

“You’re right. But you said you would do it. Doesn’t that count?”

“Not to my mom,” he said. “We get treats when we do our chores. Do another one, Grammie.”

 I thought for a minute, then said, “Ok, here’s a really hard one. Let’s say you were going to lunch and you saw one of your friends take something, a donut, out of another student’s lunch bag. What would you do?”

Carlton thought for a minute. “I wouldn’t tell on my friend,” he said, but then continued. “My friend shouldn’t have taken it. That’s stealing.” He pushed his legs forward and back in the chair. “Say another one. You do one, Willow.”

Willow perked up then. “That was a really hard one, and I can understand why you wouldn’t tell on a friend. But what if the friend took another donut the next day?”

“I would tell him to stop doing that.”

“That’s really brave, Carlton,” I said.

“Yeah, good job,” said Willow.

“And if he didn’t stop after that, you could tell an adult, and not feel bad about doing so. Adults know what to do in these situations,” I reassured.

Carlton surprised us by continuing to ask for more scenarios that he could use to discern, and though he was eager to talk about them in the hypothetical, he seemed a little wary at the prospect of things he’d already seen happen. We sat there for a half-hour as the sky darkened and lights went on in the house. I could see silhouettes of our son and his wife at the sink, doing dishes.

I wondered what happens during this transformative time between a child and Jesus Christ. Does the Savior, as one post-Catholic blogger suggests, suddenly start to care about the child’s sins?2 Or conversely, do seven-year-olds suddenly realize that the world has a purpose beyond their egocentric lives? Do seven-year-olds feel the pull of the conscience, as well as the soul?

Why is age the seven called “the age of reason?” By one estimation, at age seven we’ve seen someone take our ball and go home, or we’ve done it ourselves.

The term, “age of reason” was first described in an article, "Latency Revisited: The Age of Seven, Plus or Minus One." by child psychiatrists Theodore Shapiro and Richard Perry in 1976.3 They present findings that the seven-year-old brain has 90% of the weight it will have until the age 20. In Medieval times, children of this tender age could be conscripted for work in the legal courts. In Charles Dickens’ England, children older than seven could be charged for their crimes.

The well-known children’s book publisher Scholastic.com states that seven-year-olds usually are able to “distinguish fantasy from reality,… describe similarities between two objects, and… apply creative thinking to problem solving.”4

Kids a year earlier, the authors write, might think they can change a black cat into a skunk by drawing a white line down its back. But seven-year-olds know that solid objects and numbers are generally unchangeable: four plus five will always equal nine.

Previously, Carlton and his little brother marveled at my “magic” on Zoom when I used food color and water to create secondary colors from primary ones. Once they learn their color charts, however, they will be on to me, and my days as a magician will be over.

In French there is a word, frisson, meaning shiver or thrill. For me, the operative word for this moment in a child’s life is “realize.” The child’s soul was always there, and Jesus was always attentive to it. Now the child has a glimmer of Jesus’ face in the “other.” If the grownups around the child are loving, that child can extend that experience of God’s love through a knowing guardian’s constant care and example.

God’s is always there for us even if the parent’s is not.

Jesus says in Matthew 7:9-11, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?”

Likewise, this verse in Isaiah chapter 49 reads, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”

After finishing the dishes, Carlton’s parents moved on to putting their younger son to bed and planning for fun activities the next day. Parents rarely have time to reflect. But grandparents, like me, can take a little more time at the end of the day to talk about what we’ve learned. As in a 2020 Harvard study on whale behavior, grandmothers have a huge role to play in the viability of young ones. It’s called “the grandmother effect.”5

Jesus gives us grandparents His heart and hands, exhorting us to show His children how much He loves them, helping them to make ethical decisions.

With his parable of the father and his two sons, was Jesus was trying to explain to his audience something about free will? Like the two sons, we are constantly presented with options; the choice of proper action is up to us. When we turn seven, like Carlton, we are on the cusp of recognizing our free will and our responsibility to love God and our neighbor, and those lucky enough to be grandparents can be witness to this marvelous transformation.  

1Some names have been changed.

2https://venusproject.org/reason/letting-go-of-god-by-julia-sweeney-transcript.html

3Shapiro, T. and Perry, R. (1976), Latency Revisited: The Age 7 Plus or Minus 1. In: The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 31: 79-105.

4https://www.scholastic.com/parents/family-life/social-emotional-learning/development-milestones/age-reason.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20age%20of%20reason%20refers,co%2Dhost%20of%20the%20podcast

5https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/on-killer-whales/