Putting the Fun in Peekaboo
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When Molly Stoff was 5 months old, she didn't cry when she was dropped off at day care. This was not because Molly was unusually mature. It was because the principle of object permanence — the idea that people and things exist even when you can't see them — hadn't yet been triggered in her brain. So when Molly's mother, Terri, was out of sight, Molly didn't wonder where she'd gone. A month later, however, Molly noticed that something she wanted to remain in her vista — Mom — had disappeared. And then she cried.
Researcher Jean Piaget coined the term "object permanence" (also called "object constancy"), but parents have long recognized it as what puts the fun in peekaboo. Babies who've developed object permanence (typically between 4 and 12 months) look for a toy or person hidden under a blanket because they have come to realize it still exists even when they can't see it. "Your reappearance stimulates glee in your child, because she was expecting you but couldn't see you yet," explains Lewis Lipsitt, Ph.D., founding director of the Child Study Center at Brown University. "It's a very important aspect of early childhood development."
It's important, Lipsitt says, because object permanence forms a crucial building block for later skills. Without it, we would be forever looking for things where they used to be, even after we know they've moved somewhere else. (So why do we still do that with our car keys?) "As adults," Lipsitt says, "we depend on object constancy every time we look for something in our desk. Surgeons need object constancy to believe that the liver is in the same place on that patient as it was on the previous 20." Because a sense of object permanence grows through ordinary interaction with parents and the world, there's no need to teach it to your child. "A parent and child should just play," says Lipsitt. "That benefits them both."
