Blue’s Clues was a children’s television program developed in the 1990’s with the cooperation of child psychologists. The show was unique because it sought to incorporate the findings of cognitive psychology research on children into its content and presentation – a goal that produced surprising results.
What the researchers discovered in the course of their work was that children crave repetition, to a surprising degree – it comforts them. How much repetition do they crave? The results were unexpected, to say the least. It turns out most pre-schoolers are happiest watching exactly the same television show five times in a row. And so that’s what the producers of Blue’s Clues did – broadcast the same exact half-hour episode every weekday for five days in a row, every week. The kids loved it.
You might not be surprised by this outcome if you’ve ever sat a pre-schooler on your lap and read him a children’s book. You know what it’s like to finish “Thomas the Tank Engine,” then point to a stack of other books and suggest, “hey, how about we read ‘Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel’?” only to get shouted down: “No, read Thomas again!”
“But I just read it to you…”
“Read. It. Again!”
And so you do. Again and again and again until you’re getting kind of sick of it, until at last, little pre-schooler nephew lies comatose in your lap amid a spreading puddle of drool. Awwwww…how cute.
But why do kids like watching (or hearing) the same damned thing over and over again?
For the same reason junior (and sometimes senior) lawyers often do.
It seems oddly fitting that the words “caregiving” and “caretaking” mean precisely the same thing. Perhaps that linguistic oddity reflects the salient characteristic of care itself: a tension between our desire to receive it and our countervailing feeling of obligation to provide it. Human relations, generally, can be summarized as an on-going battle between those who provide care and those on the receiving end.
The People's Therapist 