Putting the Pieces Together
You can tell quite a bit about a child's personality by the way they do puzzles as a toddler. At least with the luxury of having 7 older than toddler children, and one current toddler, it seems to me, upon retrospect, to be a good indicator of a few personality traits.
For instance, my eldest (now nearly 18 years old), who is very methodical, private and independent, used to go to his room as a toddler, shut the door, and sit quietly and do puzzles. When he would come out, they would be all put together, and put away, with out a shred of evidence he ever did them. If it hadn't been for my quiet peeks into his room, I wouldn't have even know what he was up to.
My third child (nearly 15) is creative, exuberant and lively, and would dump out numerous puzzles, put in a piece or two, make up another game with the rest of the puzzle pieces, and then leave them all over the place and go off to a new activity.
My fourth child (nearly 13) has shown a love for work, sticking to a task until it is finished, regardless of how challenging it is. He would do puzzles, and with many trials and errors, keep at it until it was finished. Sometimes he would ask for help, but he stuck to it. He didn't seems to do puzzles for fun, but like a job. He is a very work oriented boy to this day.
Now the little one, Melanie, is nearly 2, and she loves puzzles, talks to all the pieces and is very diligent with putting them back together. She shows great perseverance and joy in doing puzzles, and I will be interested to see if these traits carry through to her grown up self.
I purposely didn't go through all 8 of my children (it would be a long post, with lots of repetition, I fear), but as I thought about writing this post, I mentally went through them all in my head, and it truly is a very accurate correlation regarding their personalities now. I also, purposely, didn't mention which one of my children it was that has the fiery temper, and used to, as a toddler, throw all the pieces across the room in a fit of anger when they would not fit in first try. But you get the idea ;)
posted by Renee at Saturday, February 12, 2011
3 Comments:
Very interesting!
I had one child like your second child, and all the rest never liked to do puzzles at all. I wonder what that says about us? :)
Very interesting. Round here puzzle pieces most often end up being used as cookies or players in some other game. But the library has lots of puzzles too and it's interesting to see how much more likely they are to sit and work the puzzles there than they are here.
Bella can do puzzles well but is more interested in playing games.
Sophie is by far the most methodical puzzle doer. Though, again, mostly when we're at the library. At home she gets distracted from her single-mindedness.
Ben's favorite puzzle is the one he got for Christmas with cars and trucks. He often takes out the pieces and carries them around, pretends they are cars and even sleeps with them. But he does know how to put them back into the puzzle-- I'm rather impressed with his dexterity in that regard. He was doing pretty well at our last library trip with getting a majority of the pieces back into the proper places and even turning them to get the orientation right.
I look forward to seeing how these tendencies play out in their developing personalities.
That is a great perspective. My kids are a mix between your first and second. Diligently putting the puzzles together dumping out another one, pieces all over, then running off to do something else.
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