What children understand about ageing, and what we've forgotten.

The question 'what was the best part?' is developmentally more sophisticated than it sounds. The seven-year-old is doing something cognitively demanding: he has taken a piece of information — the grandfather was once seven — and done something generative with it. He has produced an inquiry. He wants to know about the experience of being seven decades ago, from the perspective of someone who can now compare it to everything that came after.

This is temporal perspective-taking. It requires modelling someone else's experience across a time span that exceeds his own life by a factor of twelve. Most developmental research places this capacity as emerging around age five or six and developing substantially through middle childhood. The seven-year-old is right at the productive edge of it.

What happened next is what I want to describe. The grandfather said the best part was swimming every day for one whole summer when he was twelve. He hadn't thought about that summer in decades. The memory arrived fully formed and specific — the temperature of the water, a particular friend, a particular afternoon that went wrong and then right. He talked for eight minutes. The boy listened without moving. The boy didn't know he had just asked one of the most generative questions available in any intergenerational conversation. He had simply wanted to know. The boy didn't know he had just asked one of the most generative questions available in any intergenerational conversation. He had simply wanted to know.