A couple of weeks ago, a visiting 7-year-old noticed that one of my son’s dolls had only one arm. This kid rushed to blame my son: “You pulled it off”. In his defence, my son said “I didn’t pull it off, it fell off.”
This is an important line of defence that kids learn very young: I didn’t do it! It just happened. The distinction is not just about the choice of words. Kids are, unconsciously, recruiting an important grammatical distinction when they say these kinds of things.
This is an important line of defence that kids learn very young: I didn’t do it! It just happened. The distinction is not just about the choice of words. Kids are, unconsciously, recruiting an important grammatical distinction when they say these kinds of things.
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