Telecommunications

I was at the library today. I found myself in the children’s books section, which is an impressive little corner of the library full of picture books and simple story books and even board books for babies. A variety of toys mingle with the bookshelves, many of them more elaborate versions of what one might find in a pediatrician’s office. There’s even a rack of puppets which are also available for check-out.

Two booth-style phones have been set up at separate ends of a long bookshelf. They’re low enough for kids to reach them and play with them, and they look real. It appears that they are connected to each other somehow so that kids can use them to talk to each other, but I’m fairly sure there’s no connection to outside phone lines. Most of the time, I just see one kid pick up one phone, tell another kid to go pick up the other phone, say “Hello” into the receiver, laugh, and move on to something else. The kid I noticed today had a more… elaborate conversation.

If I had to guess his age—which is something I seldom do accurately—I would put him at about four years old, give or take. He had picked up one of the phones and was holding it to his ear while looking around. He mumbled something into the mouthpiece. He looked around the room suspiciously again. Then he emphatically said into the phone, “No! No, no, no! I said no!” He cast one more suspicious glance around the room before slightly raising his volume, intensifying his tone, and swearing into the phone. His mini-tirade, which consisted of a long train of “F-bombs” interspersed with “shut up” and “no,” lasted about a minute. Then he calmly said, “Later,” and casually returned the receiver to its hanger before picking up a book and wandering off toward another section of the library.

Naturally, I had to wonder about this scene.

Was the kid angry about something? Was he venting his frustrations into the phone? Did he feel better afterward, as if he had conducted a little self-therapy?

Moreover, how did he get that vocabulary?

While I could easily be wrong on this one, I have a hypothesis. I think he has heard one of his parents speak in that manner on the phone, using those words and tones. I think he has witnessed such phone conversations regularly and has come to believe that they are common and normal. Without understanding what he was really saying, I think he used this toy phone to play out what he has seen so often and thinks of it as nothing more than mimicry.

At least, I hope it’s something like that. I do not like the idea of a four-year-old using such language to express his anger because that’s how he really feels.