At Christmas, he saw a "Santa" on a roof at someone's light display and turned and asked me, "Can a person buy a Santa Costume?"
When he was 21 months, he sat in his car seat dazing out the window with a sad face and said, "I not a baby anymore, I a big boy."
Today out of completely nowhere he asked me where the first person in the world came from.
He 100% gets that the earth is a speck in the universe. He gets space and loves it.
I have come to realize that I have existential depression at times myself, and I worry about this with him all the time. My earliest memory of these questions was about five, not three.
It's not that I ever want him to be typical. I love who he is. I just go through these moments of grief or something that I can't put into words when I see this beautiful toddler dipping his toes his philosophy 101. I never imagined I would pass on my skeptical gene times ten to my little person. I just don't feel equipped to be his parent sometimes.

My daughter sees reality with so much clarity, and it makes me sad sometimes. She just turned 3, and already understands so many things that are worldly. We do not hide things from her much, but so much she was not taught, but has just figured out upon inspection of the world around her. I often forget I am talking to a just turned 3 year old, until she has a temper tantrum, and then I remember, oh yeah she is 3.

It can be overwhelming parenting a child that has too much intensity, too little sleep requirement, and too deep of an understanding of the world around said child. I think my last post was on her preoccupation with death. That seems to have subsided. Right now we are struggling with the low sleep requirement more than anything, but a lot of the time when she doesn't want to sleep, she does want to ask deep questions.

Just chiming in to let you know you are not alone. My son is 4 and we have been having discussions on death and not wanting to grow up for well over a year. We just approach things with a somewhat objective cycle of life perspective, paying careful attention to his feelings.

For what it is worth, I think for these types of kids it has more to do with their incredible attention to detail, awareness of the world around them, and ability to make connections than it does with a parent's own existential worries.

Yes, we are deep in a phase of examining our place in the life cycle in our house with DS3. For the last few weeks, he has insisted on being treated as a baby. The tension between the analytical perceptiveness that allows our children to pick up on uncertainties and threats and their emotional tenderness creates a difficult balance.

I am normally careful about what to discuss with DD but I slipped and I told her that an astroid was passing near Earth soon. She looked completely horrified. Her way of coping was art therapy. She drew a series of pictures about an astroid that is loaded up with love and is going to softly land on a trampoline. There was also a picture of her catching a tiny astroid with a lasso (Applejack!). She knows these are childish fantasies and she knows exactly how destructive astroids are thanks to some videos she watched on the NASA site but drawing these concepts seems to help her cope with her anxiety.

I know what a blessing DD is to our lives and how fortunate we are to have a (mostly) happy and healthy child but sometimes, I feel like I never really got to raise a child I expected to raise.

it_is_2day, my DD had serious sleeping problems so I can sympathize. Those days were really hard and I'm still recovering.

There are some works by James Webb which may help parents prepare to talk their children through these things:
-SENG article, Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals
-article: Dabrowski's Theory and Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults
-book, Searching for Meaning

Unfortunately sleep deprivation is a monster. It changes people, and not for the better. Kids who seem to require little sleep may have parents who still require sleep!

Yes, there is a lot of innocent fun that families can enjoy (with throwback to earlier childhood) even as kids grow and become responsible adults.

This thread suddenly reminded me of a decision I made as a relatively young child maybe 10 or so. I decided to not pursue theoretical science or mathematics in favor of experimental sciences and mathematics. My logic at the time was a fear of spending my entire life in pursuit of a solution that either did not exist, or was too difficult to solve for my mind. To this day I still find that if my mind wanders too far into the unknown, I rush back to information that has a high probability of being true, so as to give myself a stronger foundation to stand on. Of course, sometimes I find myself doubting even the fundamental laws of physics, but do not allow myself to stay there for desire to not consider the possibility of the alternative, and to not waste too much of my limited time on this Earth doing what I decided not to do when I was around 10.

It is probably not healthy to make such an uninformed decision at such a young age, but I am not going to spend much time pondering that question.

My daughter would relate to that, its2day. She will often talk about getting freaked out and disturbed when thinking too deeply about the univese.

Honestly, spending so much time studying space with my son is a trigger for my existential depression. I have to guard against it, and I'm sure it's all part of why I'm in language arts. Anyway, he will ask about the world ending but luckily in a theoretical way so far. My daughter, on the other hand, has begun expressing a very "nothing gold can stay" sort of depression, and it is heartbreaking to see this in a seven year old.

Two words.

Quantum entanglement.

Not trivialize this but has anyone encountered Henri the Existential Cat?

enjoy

Funny backstory: I invited my then boyfriend, now husband to attend a philosophy class in college. He fell asleep, I felt embarrassed because there were only 5 people there. Not to mention, I couldn't imagine how anyone could pass up such conversation! His response was that he had made this decision as well and was happier for it.

I also made that choice at one point. But realized that it's me, I can't change it and so I do allow myself to go to these places from time to time. But I keep it in check because I am a parent and happiness is more important than ever before.

Trust me my mind goes to the far side, but yes, I do still fear getting stuck out there, so I keep coming back to reality, just to check in to make sure it is still there. I made that decision way back then out of a fear of going down some rabbit hole that had no end. Of course, the fear within reality(Observable reality) is ... 'Is this all there is?', but I regress.

Well, today he was really hammering us with more questions. Eventually he decided that evolution doesn't make sense because why would there still be animals on earth that we evolved from (we gave him a simplistic overview of evolution because literally we have no time to really get into it because he has the flu and we are like, busy taking care of the kids.LOL) and then when we told him that some people (like many members of his extended family) believe that God created the earth, he said that doesn't make sense because how exactly could that happen. Then he told me God is an imaginary man that supposedly makes everything that they talk about at church. Basically I ended up saying, "Look, babe, no one knows about the origins of life, we just don't." He's not happy about this.
He turns four in a few weeks. I feel like I am living with a teenager.

We have had a couple of large life rights based developments affect us recently. Our country's Supreme Court just this week struck down legislation that criminalized assisting a suicide. A close personal friend is also undergoing IVF and lost the vast majority of her embryos.

I debated shielding DS3 from these developments, but he asked about them when DH and I were discussing them at dinner. He was horrified at the idea that a doctor could potentially legally take a patient's life, and we had to delve into a discussion of informed consent and guardianship, in which he was reassured to learn that parental consent is required in the treatment of minors. He asked me to promise that I would bring a baseball bat to the doctor's office to protect him in case the doctor didn't listen. I unexpectedly found myself expressing my view on assisted suicide and pre-born rights, a conversation I didn't expect to have with him until at least a few years down the line.

We had a series of conversations about pre-born rights, as well, with a then-4-year-old, precipitated by a miscarriage we had. That's the same child who needed a thorough exposition of our estate plan at about 5 or 6 years-old (inspired by, "but I don't know the alarm code!" which I think I've recounted on another thread).

I'm sorry for your loss, aeh.

It can be hard to predict when these questions will arise, certainly. I've been revisiting my source material as a refresher. I guess my best approach is constant vigilance and being prepared!

Thank you, aquinas. Death is a part of life; we feel no need to shield our children, no matter how young, from it, especially when it happens in our lives, and have tried to use it as an opportunity for reflection and discussion about our values, beliefs, and what is most precious to us, in front of and with our children.

And there is definite value in saying to a child, "that's a very good question. I think I need to think about it some more, and possibly explore some resources, seek wise counsel, research, so that we can be thoughtful and informed about this topic."

That's good advice. Thank you!

I've literally re-read this thread and Portia's helpful comments in my physics/black hole thread daily over the last week. DS3 is in a major existential funk and is expressing considerable anxiety about separation from me, namely the unlikely event of my death. He has been testing more extreme (albeit safe) behaviour to determine whether my love is as unconditional as I say it is. I think I've passed this trial by fire so far. Tonight he waxed on about the logic behind selfish behaviour. He is testing his idea of God, the duality of human existence, the concept of infinity, and the division of self from others. I did NOT expect this level of existential angst in a 3 year old.

There was also the matter of his openly saying, " Mama, you can NEVER die or go away," with my dad present. My dad, unhelpfully, felt the need to weigh in with, "[DS], everyone dies at some point." argh!

ETA rant: I've been looking into children's Catholic theological resources, and most elementary curricula are of the cut and paste/fill in the blank/circle the picture of children behaving prosocially ilk. I'm having a hard time determining the appropriate scope of discussion. I can discuss these issues on a fairly scholarly level; however, call me crazy, but I don't think that 3 is the appropriate time to introduce weighty material like Aquinas' First Mover proofs.

Asynchrony, I shake my fist in your general direction!!! I just want my sweetheart boy to be at peace and not fear abandonment or prematurely grieve my future death which, God willing, will happen when DS is an elderly man himself!

I apologize for the recent repetitive theme of my posts to those who have been supportive.

Aquinas,
Just wanted to let you know that for us, the conversations have only gotten more intense over the past year. My son is somewhat comforted by looping back to discussions of lifecycles of animals and plants and discussing death in the context of making room for new life. Forest fires are necessary so that new plants can grow. If people never died, there would not be enough room or food for new babies. He is also very comfortable with the food chain.
I try to assure him that I will do my best to teach him everything I can and that when I die (a long time from now, hopefully) he will be ready. He is fascinated by concepts of ancestors and descendents, and understands that if ancestors never die, there just aren't enough resources for descendants. He really likes math so it helps him to understand that the math just doesn't work. He mostly likes to hear that it won't happen soon and that I will have taught him everything he needs to know so he will be as ready as possible when it does happen. (I desperately hope both are true.)

SAHM, thanks for suggesting that tack. I haven't used the biology angle beyond talking about scientific discovery and life expectancy. Good idea!

My son started having existential crises (or whatever you prefer to call them) at around 3. He started asking serious, probing questions about the nature of consciousness, what happens to consciousness when the body dies, what the nature of God-consciousness is, and so on. He also started at about that time to wrestle with the idea of "infinity" - how could the Universe be infinite? If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What existed before the Big Bang? And so on.

He would have really big feelings during these sessions. I remember visiting my parents and lying on the bed with him as we both cried and he wrestled with his new idea that some day his consciousness might end and that I would die.

I found it very hard, myself, to deal with. (After all, I share many of these concerns myself!) I did my best to remain present with him and affirm that he was having really big ideas that even many adults would find quite unsettling. I also settled on a philosophical approach of just telling the truth, all the time. So I didn't say "Well, God is X and this is what happens when you die" (we don't share a family religion, which complicates things somewhat), but instead "Some people think this happens. Other people think this happens. Still other people think this happens."

This was quite hard for me and I often wished that I could just say "This is what our communal religion teaches", but after a while I realized that I was probably taking an overly rosy view of what that would be like. Because with my kid, asserting that things that are not verifiable are a certain way is a path to difficulty. We do not do Santa, in part because as a mixed-religion family it felt too complicated, and in part because literally the first time he heard about Santa, he spent about a minute intently studying the image of sled/jolly man/rooftop/gifts, then turned to me and said "This isn't true, right?" He has a brain that sees many potential holes in an argument. Unless I'm willing and able to defend - and defend well - every single hole (and with some stuff I am) I don't even start. Too hard. So I tell him what I believe about God and the afterlife, but I don't assert that it is factually correct for everyone, because his brain really needs systems to work universally or it starts finding the gaps. I am often not prepared, myself, to fill in all of the gaps so it is just not always possible for me to hand him a unified theory that works.

I think it's been helpful to talk about how our brains are like focusing mechanisms, and sometimes "sad thoughts" can have a lot of pulling power, and you can consciously switch the focus of the brain if you try and keep at it. Pondering death and consciousness can be emotionally overwhelming in very young people, so it's useful to know you can, with effort, focus yourself elsewhere. (I do my best to model this.)

It's hard. You have my sympathies! On the other hand, now that he's a bit older, this drive to find meaning is also kind of fun to watch in him. He has recently started to discuss gender roles (he has longish hair, and recently a lady with short hair told him he should cut his hair to be more appropriately boyish... you can imagine the number of long conversations about gender norms and hypocrisy and wanting to control others we had after that), adult control of what children read, social justice, etc. So I do feel like this is an area where growth has really improved things for us, as the distance between what his brain is capable of thinking, and what his mind is ready to think has become a little smaller.