Who is your neighbor?
This will seem a little odd, but I was talking to my daughter the other day about the people living in our neighborhood and she asked who our neighbors were. She wanted to know if the people down the street were our neighbors. Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question. Basically I couldn’t figure out what constitutes a neighbor. Most dictionaries state that a neighbor is someone living near or bordering you. Many people just use the word neighbor to describe people living next to them, then others call those same people ‘next door neighbors.’ So are the people down the street our neighbors? We are in a neighborhood after all. What I finally told my daughter was that the people bordering our house were our neighbors, and each house in our neighborhood has neighbors, so the collection of each of these neighbors makes up our neighborhood. So those ‘people down the street’ I mentioned earlier would be our neighbor’s neighbor’s … neighbor. Is that right? I don’t know, but that is what I’m sticking to until I’m convinced otherwise. Let me know what you think.
I’d also like to hear other stories where your children generated abstract thought in you.
