Laura on Life

It's all in the interpretation

By Laura Snyder

[July 03, 2009]  Interpretation is all a matter of who is doing the interpreting, isn't it? Our planet's inhabitants have so many diverse languages. It's not surprising that very often leaders of nations are misinterpreted and misquoted. If the world were less tolerant than it already is, the lack of understanding caused by misinterpretation could've ended our species long ago.

Fortunately, the human species has learned to realize that interpretation is not infallible. We've learned this fact through our children. As parents, we try to understand our children and to make ourselves clear, but a child interprets what we say through the filter of their own limited experiences.

For example, a few years ago, my daughter, who is a very smart cookie, was having some trouble in math. It was second grade. She was doing subtraction and just couldn't understand the concept of borrowing the one. I was trying to get her to understand by repetitiously going over the drill: Borrow the one, then take away the smaller number from the larger number.

Suddenly she stopped me with, "So, Mommy, when do we put it back?"

"Put what back?"

"The one."

"Well, we don't."

"Then that's not borrowing, it's stealing."

She had a valid point. The lights suddenly came on in my head as I realized that she was taking the word "borrow" very literally and that's why she was having a hard time. She wanted to give that "borrowed" one back at some point, and it wasn't happening.

"OK, here's what we're going to do," I said. "When you are subtracting, you are going to pretend you are a robber and you are going to take away and you are going to steal, not borrow. And when you are adding, you are going to be the good guy by adding to and giving, not lending."

From that time on, she never had a problem with her math. It was all in her interpretation of the words.

My son, when he was younger, knew that when he threw something in the trash, he never saw it again. It was very traumatic for him, apparently. He didn't know where it went, just that it was gone. Because he heard that the garbage men buried the trash somewhere, he called our trash can the "portal to the underworld;" something he undoubtedly picked up from his older brother. His reasoning was a little skewed, of course. Interpretation of this logic needed the back-story before it could be understood.

You see, children have a language and understanding all their own. Each one is different. It is for adults to determine the correct interpretation while leaving our minds wide open to account for the almost certain inaccuracies in their logic. Or, in some cases, for our inaccurate representation of certain words.

You can't take anything for granted when interacting with a child. One day, a few years ago, when I threatened to ground one of my kids for some transgression, a look of horror came over his face as he cried, "Please don't bury me!"

Apparently, he thought that graveyards were for "grounding" people who did bad things. I felt like I had just run over a puppy.

I believe that the best foreign diplomats probably are those who have a lot of children. Consider this: If war is the result of a breakdown of diplomacy, and diplomacy can only be reached with understanding and a wide margin for interpretation errors, then truly, our children may very well be the reason the human race has not only survived, but thrived. Our children have taught us that interpretation is everything.

[By LAURA SNYDER]

Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author and speaker. You can reach her at [e-mail] or visit www.lauraonlife.com for more info.