Also, when my children were in bilingual preschool the first words they each really learned were all the names of the farm animals. So many songs for small children are very agrarian, as well.

But I have to say that this hasn’t been my experience with my 3 year old son.
He LOVES tractors. And cars, and trains, and bikes, and trolleys, and wheelbarrows, and anything with wheels. He shows very little interest in most animals, even when given the opportunity to interact with live ones. In his picture books, on the farm pages full of animals, and a few tractors/harvestors, his only interest is in the machinary. His first word was “ball”, and currently he loves saying “WHEEL!” pointing to anything that has wheels.
This is hard for me! I am vegan, living car-free, we go EVERYWHERE by bike, and he likes that well enough, but his world is focused around oil-age machines… (and me, I guess!)
He likes his books about ducks and bears, but doesn’t say any animal sounds, instead he identitifies Mama duck, and Baby duck, and Frog… (he likes jumping like a frog).
The farm paradigm is absent from his world, and maybe that is partly my fault, as I have not read traditional farm stories to him. And we live in an urban environment. But we never have supermarket tantrums, because we never do our shopping in a supermarket, luckily there are wonderful small organic stores and markets around us. He sees food in its unpackaged, unplastic, unprocessed state in my kitchen. And when he is older, I hope that food origins and small-scale food production will be figuring MUCH higher than cars and trucks in the general paradigm… I want to go back to the farm too.

I guess most kids do. But I mean, I was kind of hardcore about it. Every so often we would go up to the mountains where we had a cabin and I would spend hours exploring or feeding the birds and squirrels. I loved books about kids who had to rough it outdoors on their own.

Now, as an adult, that affinity has been almost completely died. Is it because I’ve grown up in an industrialized world? I dunno; I know lots of people my age who have grown up in the same world love the outdoors. Is it just my personality? Possibly. However, I don’t think that growing up on a farm would have changed that. My great-grandfather grew up on a farm and hated it–he wanted to be a lawyer instead.

While farm living is fascinating to me at the moment for practical reasons–because the old ways of farming were so much more sustainable–I don’t think there’s anything inherently virtuous about it.

I would also argue that teaching children farm animal sounds in spite of no longer living on a farm is more due to tradition than anything. Think of all the nonsensical, centuries-old nursery rhymes we still teach children. Raising children seems to be steeped in tradition, no matter what it is.

But even that tradition fades. The oldest nursery rhyme still in common use is only from the 1600s or so (I happened to look this up recently, coincidentally). If the majority of people continue to live in cities instead of rural areas (this switch happened just a few years ago or something)–assuming massive social upheaval from peak oil or climate change doesn’t happen–then I think we’ll see a shift in what parents teach children from rural to urban topics–such as switching out cow sounds for car sounds.

This post really moved me. I needed it today.

Thank you!

I think the only time my uncle got angry was if you went near the pig pen–they were mean and he worried I’d be hurt. Or if you made too much noise in the barn when the cows were being milked–if frightened the cows and they gave less milk. He had a pet cow that he would let me pet on the nose and sometimes let me sit on. And if there were calves in the calf pen he would let me dip my fingers in the milk and let them suck it off to feel how raspy their tongues were.

And then there was the farm my mother grew up on during the Depression. It was just down the road from my uncles farm. Her parents were gone and the farm sold but all the stories my mother told about growing up there are still fresh. I have the blankets that were woven at the local mill from wool sheared from the sheep she took care of as a child. I have my grandmother’s sock knitting needles she made the family’s socks and stockings with. I have one of her aprons, complete with a stain, that she hand sewed and decorated with bright green rick rack. I have my grandfather’s hand wood working tools he used to make the bedroom set I have in my room. I have the canning jars my grandmother got when she bought coffee–the coffee came in the jars. I even have some of the flour sack towels my mother did hemstitching on to make them prettier when she was a girl.

She talked about home when we were canning peaches or putting up pickles or making the apple sauce. She talked about home when she taught me to sew, to hemstitch towels, to turn the heel on a sock, and especially to plant the onions in a straight, not wibbly wobbly, row.

We live on a farm now. Mom is gone almost 5 years now but when I go to visit my aunt, she always sends home something she’s growing even tho she’s 95….it’s in her blood.

Our cat was a talker – you know some of them are very noisy. This toddler was the youngest of three small children and didn’t talk, never having much chance amongst the noise.

Their mother didn’t talk to them, entertaining with the TV. This little girl fascinated me in that she spent such a long time ‘talking’ to my cat. She could mimic his meows perfectly and you couldn’t tell which one was making them.

She was convinced he was talking back to her and I think he might have been the best friend she ever had. I wonder if she ever remembers him.