``...your kid didn't watch you walk all over the place and try to imitate it? You didn't take you kid out into arenas where all sorts of other people were walking, making walking something all the more desirable to imitate/learn? ...'' Alan Rudy
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Yes of course. But there seemed to be something else going on. I gave the example of blind kids. Also several different cultures bind small infants and small todders so they are eastier to carry and otherwise don't engage in this kind of play anywhere near as much as we do.
My impression was I was along for the ride so to speak. The baby was training us, not the other away.
I got to watch a little of this same development in my grand kids a girl 5, a boy going on 4. In this case the kids seem to run their own world together.
My resistance to the idea of imitation in activities like walking (in very early years) is that the kind of concentration required is utterly different than watching others walk. So I actually agree with Chris---to a certain extent.
I knew about this difference from watching climbers, and then learning to climb. It's a qualitatively different kind of learning and thinking. What it feels like is learning through the body.
And of course you have no idea what you look like climbing because you can't see yourself. Dancers use a mirror. Anyway I got into climbing when a fairly althetic blind friend of mine wanted to learn to climb and needed somebody sighted to go along.
Climbing with a blind partner is a strange experiment in learning that for motion and space knowledge we depend more on kinesthic sense system than a visual or auditory system. It's this kinesthic sense system that we use to walk and make body motions in space.
After awhile, after I had learned a lot of the technique through practicing the climbing moves, I could understand what I was seeing in others. But I clearly remember at first watching what they were doing made no sense to me when I was merely watching.
I remember also trying to learn to dive and do easy gymnastics as a kid. These are all very similar. You want to practice enough so that you don't have to either think through the move or engage any more conscieous part of the brain. Playing an instrument or learning a long complicated dance routine is a similar form of learning.
CG