e to his incessant
"why?" but when he asks "why?" he really is not searching for reasons
at all. A large part of the time he is not even asking a question. He
merely enjoys this reciperative form of speech and is indignant if
your answer is not what he expects. One of my children enjoyed this
antiphonal method of following his own thoughts to such an extent that
for a time he told his stories in the form of questions telling me each
time what to answer! His questions had a social but no scientific
bearing. And even when a three-year-old asks a real question he wants to
be answered in terms of action or of sense impressions and not in terms
of reasons why. How could it be otherwise since he still thinks with his
senses and his muscles and not with that generalizing mechanism which
conceives of cause and effect? The next time a three-year-old asks you
"why you put on shoes?" see if he likes to be told "Mother wears shoes
when she goes out because it is cold and the sidewalks are hard," or if
he prefers, "Mother's going to go outdoors and take a big bus to go and
buy something:" or "You listen and in a minute you'll hear mother's
shoes going pat, pat, pat downstairs and then you'll hear the front door
close bang! and mother won't be here any more!" "Why?" really means,
"please talk to me!" and naturally he likes to be talked to in terms he
can understand which are essentially sensory and motor.

Now what activities are appropriate for the first stories? I think the
answer is clear. His, the child's, own! The first activities which a
child knows are of course those of his own body movements whether
spontaneous or imposed upon him by another. Everything is in terms of
himself. Again I think none of us would like to hazard a guess as to
when the child comes through to a sharp distinction between himself
and other things or other persons. But we are sure, I think, that this
distinction is a matter of growth which extends over many years and that
at two, three, and even four, it is imperfectly apprehended. We all know
how long a child is in acquiring a correct use of the pronouns "me" and
"you." And we know that long after he has this language distinction, he
still calls everything he likes "mine." "This is my cow, this is my
tree!" The only way to persuade him that it is _not_ his is to call it
some one else's. Possessed it must be. He knows the world only in
personal terms. That is, his early sense of relationship is that of