Eleven Going on Fifty
Subject: Jason Date: November 13, 2018 Age: 11 Time: 2:06 pm Sex: Male Setting: His Home
On November 13, 2018 at 3:06pm I observed as Jason* an eleven year old boy as came home from school and went about his day. He was wearing blue denim jeans, a green and grey flannel, and a grey t-shirt underneath. He is a skinny, active kid, slightly shorter than his classmates with brown hair, green eyes, and olive skin. Jason comes from a strict home with set rules and clear expectations, he has to finish homework before anything besides sports practices, he is restricted on what he eats, as the whole family is gluten and dairy free, he’s not allowed to use electronics on school nights, this is why I chose to observe on this Tuesday as he was missing school the next day. He lives with his family including his mother, father, and older brother. During my observation, the whole family was in and out of contact with him. I am a nanny for Jason and I see him nearly everyday but I have never really paid attention to every move he makes like I did today.
Since Jason is now eleven his parents allow him a little more freedom and because of that freedom we have been practicing his directional skills as you never know when he might need to know his way home. When I pick him up from school I let him tell me which ways to turn or whether or not to continue straight in order to get from his school to his house. When we begun practicing he was unable to even tell me which way to turn out of his school to begin our journey home and now during todays observation he was able to get us all the way home. This shows how his spatial reasoning is improving since he his now able to grasp landmarks and formulate correct directions to his home.
Jason is small for his age and suffers from hyperthyroidism which makes it hard for him to gain weight and grow taller. However, this doesn’t stop him from being a faster runner than his brother two years older than him and doesn’t slow him down in his volleyball practices. He is left-handed which often means that both of his cerebral hemispheres work together and one is not necessarily more dominant than the other one as opposed to the left hemisphere being more dominant in right-handed people. Though Jason is small in stature I don’t see this slowing him down and I feel he is still at an age where being tall and bigger isn’t important to boys yet and therefore it doesn’t have much of an effect on him at this time.
We arrive home from school at exactly 3:06pm and the first thing Jason does when the garage door opens is go directly to the snack section and chooses a chocolate chip Zbar, which is a kids version of the Cliff bar. He then continues into the house and sets all of his stuff down and plops down on the couch. He is a very high energy kid to begin with and likes to be intellectually stimulated. While he eats his bar he asks their Amazon Alexa to tell him some jokes and sinks into the couch.
He continues by starting his homework first with Spanish, he has been learning Spanish since he was 6 so he is nearly fluent and considered bilingual. During the time he studies Spanish he only speaks in Spanish, Berk tells us “A large body of research shows that children who become fluent in two languages are advanced in cognitive development.” However, Jason’s first language is English and he attends a private school for the gifted. Knowing him before this assignment and then watching him closely is interesting because I have realized that his language is so much more advanced than it was when I first met him two years ago. Really watching him and listening to his sentences and how well he communicates with his brother who is four years older than him. When he doesn’t understand a word someone uses he asks what it means. Due to the fact that Jason goes to a school for the gifted I believe his language development is slightly higher than other children his age, he uses words that many eleven years olds have never heard of and has a constant desire to learn more and more.
After completing his Spanish homework, he asks his brother to play “Would you rather?” with him where he asks his brother if he would “rather live the rest of his life completely covered head to toe in hair or have no hair at all on your head, eyebrows, anywhere” and then begins laughing and laughing. Preschool children play with language, and school-age children continue to create words and show a great interest in riddles and other forms of verbal humor. Older children begin to use language to describe and understand important aspects of themselves. I see him in between using language to display humor and using language to describe and understand different aspects of himself. He asks whats going on in other peoples lives and compares them to what is going on in his life while trying his best to understand.
He then continues to ask his dad and brother to play basketball with him and asks his mom to cut him up an apple. This made me think of how children view gender differences, we learn how prevailing stereotypes in culture display boys as more active and aggressive and girls as more emotional and helpful (Cook, 380). I have noticed the boys in this family act this way before with me, their mom, girls in their schools and sports, and even their female coaches in sports. Later in the afternoon, I help Jason get ready for Cotillion and as I adjust his tie and show him which buttons of his suit are to be buttoned and which isn’t he says to me “you’re not a boy, why do you know how to do this?”, which shows he has a very strong sense of stereotypical gender roles.
During his time playing basketball with his brother and his father I noticed he gets very discouraged when he misses his shot or when he realizes his older brother has made more baskets than him. He is becoming more and more self-self-conscious and is focusing more on himself and what he views as failure than the fun of playing basketball with his brother and father. At the age of eleven children often experience more and more self-self-consciousness and have a higher sensitivity to criticism which is very apparent in this game of basketball. When Jason’s brother makes a comment about the score and how Jason is behind he decides “it isn’t fun and he doesn’t want to play any longer.”
Jason likes to spend his little spare time watching tv, his favorite show is Teen Titans Go, or playing video games like Minecraft. Video games are most popular with boys aged 8-12 years so Jason fits right in that demographic. He has always been a very creative kid and video games are known to “improve a variety of skills, including spatial skills, the ability to interpret visual images like pictures and diagrams, response times to visual targets, and strategies for keeping track of things happening at several different screen locations” (Cook, 407). He has two board games that he has created completely from scratch, plays many different mind games, and loves to draw and create characters which all can be promoted by a healthy amount of video games usage.
Jason is a very creative young person, he enjoys these activities like video games, creating and playing board games, telling and hearing riddles, and also loves to participate in story-telling. I started watching him three years ago and we have had a running story going on where we take time throughout the week and add to the story. Sometimes when we aren’t feeling very creative we think back to the beginning of the story and how silly it was before. I can see now that Jason’s thoughts are much more logical and organized as these are traits of middle childhood. His levels of cognitive development have grown rapidly over the past three years.
Jason enjoys being the center of attention and likes to have people watching him when he succeeds in a new or difficult task. He seeks the approval of the adults and those older than him and though he likes being the center of attention he also appreciates alone time. He enjoys playing with Legos in his room or will retreat to a corner to read his book. He always walks out of school in a group of friends all dressed similarly and he tells me of all the things him and his friends have in common. He feels the pressures to conform to his classmates dressing habits and grooming habits as you can see them all walk out looking nearly the same. He recently developed his first crush, named Elizabeth, and turns pink when he talks about her.
Overall, Jason has the maturity of someone way beyond his years, he has a mental capacity and overall understanding above that of your typical eleven year old, this is why he attends a school for the gifted. He values academics, sports, and health above everything else as those are the values of his parents. He varies from being very kind and loving to kind of cold and closed off, this can be seen more and more as he is maturing and becoming more self aware and self-conscious. Jason is eleven years old and is bilingual due to his high levels of education, he accepts new cognitive skills well and is overall very well adapted. He knows how to have fun, be silly, and get creative but he also knows when it is time to be serious, get work done, and focus. *Names have been changed to protect privacy
References
Berk, L. E. (2017). Child development. India: Pearson.
Cook, J. L., & Cook, G. (2014). The world of children (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson.