The Walk That Takes Forever: When Your Toddler Stops at Everything

You left the house with ten minutes to spare. Now you are standing on the sidewalk while your toddler crouches over a crack in the concrete, and you can see the car from here. A leaf. A bug. A bit of string. You are going to be late again, you know it, and your toddler is pointing at a snail.

That constant noticing is not stalling, even when it works out that way. At two and three, attention goes wherever the newest thing is, and a point is an invitation: come see this with me. The stop is your child looking. The point is your child asking you to look too. Most days you cannot stop for all of it. You can stop for one. The people I have spent more than 20 years with, the ones who make new things for a living, mostly started as the kids who stopped.

What Kit does

In Kit's Big Curiosity, Mia's little red ball bounces out the gate while she naps, and Kit sets off to bring it back before she wakes. He looks UP and finds a bird building a nest, twig by twig. He looks DOWN and finds a flower growing in a crack in the sidewalk. He looks LEFT and finds the whole sky in a puddle. Every stop is a "not the ball," and every stop is also one more interesting thing to carry home to Mia. The book asks the child listening to point up, down, left and right along with Kit, so the stop-and-look walk your toddler already takes becomes something the two of you do on purpose, on the couch, with no car waiting.

What you can try

• Try giving the walk a job before you leave: "Find one thing to show me." It may turn into three things. That is fine. The job gives the walk a direction, not a limit.
• When you are truly out of time, name what they found before you move: "A bug. Good eyes." Three words, and you keep walking. Your child got seen, and that is usually most of what they wanted.
• When you have to pick them up mid-crouch, say what you are leaving: "Bye, snail. We will look tomorrow." It will not stop every protest. It gives the stop an ending instead of a theft.

Where the coloring page fits

The free pack has a coloring page for each of Kit's finds, plus a game called Up, Down, Left, Right! with four boxes to draw in and a Look and Ooh! Walk checklist for the next time you do have the minutes. On the afternoon you cannot face another sidewalk crouch, you can sit at the table instead, point up, down, left and right together, and let the looking happen at a pace that does not cost anyone anything.

Tomorrow there will be another snail.

More for this book

• The book: Kit's Big Curiosity (Book 1)
• All 20 STEM picture books for toddlers and preschoolers
• Free coloring pages for all 20 books
• Blog: More parent moments

Sources

• Kit's Big Curiosity: The World Is Full of Interesting Things, Book 1 of Kit's Little Sparks.
• Free coloring and activity pack for Book 1 (8 pages, PDF, no sign-up).

Chris Kuczynski is an engineer turned registered patent attorney, a preschool co-founder, and a dad. He is the author of Kit's Little Sparks, a 20-book STEM series that gives children ages 2 to 4 the social and emotional foundations of the inventor's mindset. It is the first of four age-tiered series for readers ages 2 to 12.