Messy Children Learn More by Playing with Their Food

Is your child messy? There may be a reason behind the destruction that children can sometimes leave in their wake. Scientists have discovered that the messier a toddler gets while playing with food in the high chair, the more he or she is learning.

In order to learn a bit more about how toddlers develop, the scientists examined how 16-month-old children learn words for nonsolid food. Previous research has shown that toddlers actually learn more readily about solid objects than nonsolid ones since they can easily identify them due to their unchanging size and shape. In contrast, oozy, gooey and runny food is much harder for a child to identify.

During the course of their experiments, the researchers exposed 16-month-olds to 14 nonsolid objects, mostly food and drinks such as applesauce, pudding, juice and soup. As they presented the objects, the researchers gave them made-up words, such as "dax" or "kiv." Then a minute later, the scientists asked the children to identify the same food in different sizes or shapes. This required the children to go beyond relying simply on shape and size and instead explore what the substances were made of in order to make the correct identification and word choice.

Most of the children actually dove into the task by poking, prodding, touching, feeling, eating and even throwing the nonsolids in order to understand what they were and in order to make the correct association. In fact, the toddlers that interacted the most with the foods (those that were the messiest) were the most likely to correctly identify them by their texture and name them.

That's not all the scientists found, either. It turns out that setting also mattered to how well the children did. Toddlers in a high chair were more likely to identify the food correctly than those seated in other areas, such as at a table.

"It turns out that being in a high chair makes it more likely you'll get messy, because kids know they can get messy there," said Larissa Samuelson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "It may look like your child is playing in the high chair, throwing things on the ground, and they may be doing that, but they are getting information out of (those actions). And, it turns out, they can use that information later. That's what the high chair did. Playing with these foods there actually helped these children in the lab, and they learned the names better."

The findings are published in the journal Developmental Science.