Earthworms & Mortality

Digging for earthworms one sunny spring day, Baby Man had a jolly time finding them, pulling them out of the ground and chatting with them.

I was thinking about Yellow House Homeschool's recent post about whether they would intervene if a bug was in Mortal Danger . . . and about the time I pointed out a beautiful fuzzy yellow caterpillar to a two year old Scooby, who gleefully stomped on it.

As I sat there, holding the worm bucket, I tried to remember being three. I dissected my fair share of hapless insects, and except for a few grown-up voices telling me "...not to squish that spider because it will rain!" there wasn't any sort of moral judgment made.

I'm quite confident I learned a lot about How Living Things Work, and a lot about Death, from messing about with bugs.

I suggest that Wee Urchins can't be expected to understand why they shouldn't squish a living creature, because they don't have any concept of mortality. How will they (gently) discover that living things are fragile and mortal, if they can't experience it first hand? My admonishments to be gentle are meaningless, if they don't know there are real, 'green juice all over your hands' consequences to not being gentle.

If I catch them trying to squish a rare, endangered Hairy Guatemalan Ice-Skating Bug or, you know, one of the last living bees (!) I'll step in.

Beyond that, I think I'll just sit back and keep my mouth shut while Baby Man rips the poor worms in half and yells "Look! I make TWO worms! WAKE UP WORM!"

HW