Our son, Take, is assembling blocks in a good mood.
When I think I have assembled a square block into a nearly square shape, he holds it up in front of his own eyes, turns to me, and says, “Kasha!
“What’s that? A camera?”
He answered, “camera!”. This surprised me a little.
The concept of a camera that is still square, still held up to the eye, and still makes a “click” shutter sound. This is clearly a camera that is more than 10 years old, and is a nostalgic imitation in this day and age when photography is almost exclusively done with smartphones.
I have a SLR camera and I sometimes take pictures with exactly the same gesture he just did. It is possible that he imitated it, but I think it is probably not true. This is because the onomatopoeic sound of the shutter release “click” is clearly knowledge I have acquired from somewhere. In other words, they must have learned it as their own thing from what someone else had done at the nursery school.
In this way, anachronistic things are unexpectedly passed on to children. Especially for preschoolers who are active in “pretend play,” old-fashioned behavior is probably a tradition that they inherit from their seniors.
(2023.10.10)
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