I noticed a new skill in my son the other day: clapping. He was sitting on his little playmat, surrounded by toys, when he heard a song that my wife had previously played to him in the womb repeatedly. He got a big smile on his little face, his eyes lit up bright, he readied his entire body and flung his arms up and behind with a great force in order to bring them back together and create that marvelous clapping sound. My son puts his entire being into clapping and if he is sitting up throws himself off balance because he is trying so hard.
When I excitedly notified my wife of this amazing new feat our son had undertaken she calmly told me that they had been teaching him this in daycare. For those who are first reading this blog I’d point you to my previous posts concerning our hesitations about having our son in daycare. At any rate I experienced the emotion of jealousy. How could those other people be teaching my son to clap? That means they were able to experience him clapping before I was. This fact saddened me a great deal.
At the same time, though, I would not have thought to teach my son to clap until he was a little older and we had taken him to a theatrical play, a concert of some sort, or an event where applause would be appropriate. I began to calm down. My son had learned something useful and fun probably earlier than he would have learned it from me (though I suspect my wife would have taught him). These very real issues are the trade-off of daycare. It is not all positive and it is not all negative. It is not what we wanted though it is more than we expected. At the end of the day one thing is true: my son is clapping.