I have to laugh at the folks in the notes claiming this is fake because “no 2-yr old is that advanced”. My guys, I work at a daycare almost exclusively with 2-3 year olds and let me tell you some of the wild shit I heard this last week alone,
“Uhhh, i ASSUME we’re going to the playground soon??” -2.5 year old girl
“[3 year old boy] pushed me because he doesn’t have a manners.” -2 yr old girl
“Did you spill your water?” “No no no no it’s not a concern” -2 yr old boy (while running away, dripping wet)
The two year-old is now a solid two and a half. Just now, he was sitting on the couch playing with his pretend flip phone and he frowned and said “for gods sake. My battery is empty.”
The other day at breakfast I asked him if he was going to eat any more of his oatmeal and he said “no, I think I’m just gonna move on with my life.”
If you don’t have a lot of interactions with young children:
Kids are smarter than you think
Six months makes a really big difference when that is 1/5 of the total time you’ve been alive
All this, and also, they can tell you lots about their favorite things. My 2 year old nephew can tell you all about Star Wars (the 8 movies he’s seen at least) and loves going out of his way to bring up how Anakin was good and bad and good again when he died. Trust me, little kids learn and mimic and reenact all the things they get attached to. Also, he named his first fish Jengo Fett, and all following fish Boba Fett, so juries still out on how much he understands clones.
Kids pick up the language that’s used around and to them. Mannerisms too. They are tiny, efficient mimics and it will come out at the WEIRDEST times. Young kids will ABSOLUTELY say all the stuff listed here.
My cousin was somewhere between two and three, and I’d just arrived at her house, and she’s animatedly telling me a story of some kind, and I listen as I make my way through the house, get to the couch, and kick my shoes off. She stops dead in the middle of her sentence, puts her hands on her hips, levels me with a glare the likes of which I haven’t seen since, and goes, “WHAT are they doing there? Do you think the box at the front door is for DECORATION?”
Her mum, standing in the kitchen and watching all this, was GOBSMACKED. Apparently she said that exact phrase more often than she realised, and her kid had picked it up verbatim and started using it on unsuspecting guests (me).
(I got up and put my shoes in the box at the front door immediately)
My family’s lore includes the time my mother offhandedly said to Cousin’s son–who was maybe five–that Cousin’s wife certainly did have strong opinions about some minor thing, and the kid let out a sigh and said, in the driest and flattest and most world-weary tone you’ve ever heard, “Tell me about it.”
once i was helping with a class of 3 year olds and during drawing time one girl asked for a lion, specifically a lioness. i drew it and she just looked in silence so thinking she wanted a more liony lion i was like “do you want me to draw a boy lion next?” and she gives me this 🤨ass affronted look and says “umm she doesn’t NEED a man.”
Kids will do three things reliably:
Repeat what they’ve heard, incorrectly and/or in the wrong context, to comic effect
Repeat what they’ve heard in exactly the correct context, which is somehow even funnier
Casually knock you on your ass with some offhand, but utterly profound, original statement
[image: an edited screenshot of a TikTok. A Black man in a T shirt and baseball cap leans out to look at a road. Text reads
I bring a sort of “you don’t need to pathologize every single of your thoughts and behaviors unless they cause u a significant discomfort bc it further alienates u from your own feelings and it’s the reason you perceive yourself in such a fragmented way” vibe to the conversation that people obsessed with watching 1 min long videos on tiktok about “narcissists” and attachment styles but have a mental breakdown when confronted with an actual “crazy” person don’t really like
I was actually just reading about this in Caste: The Origins of our Discontent. The author talks about how one’s body goes into stress or anxiety or defense mode when the person knows they’re being followed, watched, or otherwise scrutinized. She brought race into it. A Nigerian man, who was just a person in his country, was healthy as anything. He got to the U.S. and within a year, his doctor told him he was suddenly pre-diabetic and had high blood pressure. He never had those things in his country. He learned that being Black in the U.S. is a very different experience than being Black in a Black-centric country. The author elaborated more about those in poverty, women, and being a minority in general. Having that “fight or flight” triggered in the body, sometimes for hours or days or weeks at a time, degrades the body’s natural defenses, making them more vulnerable to disease.
