#10: Why Would Anyone climb a ladder to nowhere?

A rising toddler

She woke up from a two-hour nap, got up, pushed two doors open, padded into the room, and started silently climbing a ladder.

She’d been rehearsing her moves tenaciously for a few weeks.

There is nothing special for her to reach at the top, nobody cheering for her ascent from the sidelines. But you should see her furrowed eyebrows, still drowsy from her nap, yet laser-focussed on her goal. Unflappable, except for that tiny smirk when she reaches the last rung.

It’s freaking adorable. And it touches me more deeply than motivational speakers pumping their fist in the air to loud music in front of a packed stadium. Not only because she’s our cute, fast-growing toddler, but also because I’m awed by her no-frills motivation, straight from within.

She climbs, again and again, with visible delight¹.

She keeps climbing when nobody’s watching.

She climbs up even if she’s not really sure how to get down.

I reckon she is a 4 on the 1-to-5 “motivation to move” scale for infants proposed by researcher Osnat Atun-Einy and her coauthors² in a 2013 paper.

Because she enjoys the feeling of lifting her body?

“Infants’ motivation to learn about their own abilities and their joy in discovering new actions prompts them to try out many different behaviors,” wrote Atun-Einy, who works at the department of physical therapy of the University of Haifa in Israel. “The movement itself, not an external reward, can be sufficient for infants to explore the possibilities of movement³.”

Because she likes the view?

“With each new achievement in posture and locomotion,” babies can see and explore different things, wrote psychologist Karen Adolph, who studies infant motor development at New York University.

For example, babies who walk get a higher, wider field of view, free hands to carry and explore objects, and the ability to check out what’s around the corner or in the next room. “Infants sometimes capitalize on opportunities for learning and sometimes do not, but nevertheless, the opportunities are available,” she adds in this 2019 paper.

Because she’s learning?

In Adolph’s words, my toddler is learning to learn. “Motor development is enabling—it engenders new opportunities for learning and doing that can instigate cascades of development in far-flung domains.”

Atun-Einy’s team observed that the babies’ average motivation increased throughout the study (between 7 and 12 months of age), and that strongly motivated infants acquired skills earlier than weakly motivated infants.

“Motivation to move and motor development enjoy a reciprocal relationship,” they wrote. That is, babies who learn new motor skills are motivated to move, and vice versa: there is no chicken and no egg⁴.

Because Why Not?

Some researchers have pondered why a baby who’s become an expert at one type of locomotion would give that up to try something new and difficult. In the case of the transition from crawling to walking, Adolph found that novice walkers could get farther faster than expert crawlers without falling more often. So walking babies can get places more efficiently without the “increased cost” of falling—she writes: “part of the answer to ‘why walk?’ is ‘why not?’”

PS Housekeeping

This is post #10! Time for some clarifications based on feedback I’ve received. (Do keep it coming!)

I didn’t know the newsletter would be so frequent!

I’m publishing 2 or 3 posts per week, as per the terms of the Attuned Writer Fellowship, which funds my time to write the newsletter for a year. In November, I condensed all the month’s posts into just 3 weeks, so they came in quick succession. The pace will slow down a tad from December on.

On what days do you post?

So far, I posted on Mondays + Wednesdays + Fridays. Now I’m starting to experiment with a different schedule, and I’ll see what works best for everyone.

I read your post online, cool stuff.

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1. By the way, her twin sister does a fraction of all that climbing; she’s interested in other things at the moment.

2. Scores go from very low (1 = babies lie, sit still, and when they do move, they do so for a short time) to very high (5 = “Infants move for the sake of moving and movements are quick, frequent, and have high intensity. Play can seem secondary. Infants prefer high energy activities”, defined as “vigorous movements that involved big movements of the body, large weight shifts, and the use of multiple body parts”. Like climbing.)

3. which reminds me of Alex Honnold’s love of dangling (#2).

4. which reminds me of the reciprocal relationship reading enjoyment and motivation to read (#3).