“Asking questions, finding answers, and gaining expertise is the learning process in general,” Chen says. There’s decades of research to back that up: Three separate studies have found that older children with intense interests tend to be of above-average intelligence.Ī dino obsession, then, can be a kid’s way of taking in a new subject in a way that feels familiar to them: through the business of having fun. In short, they make better learners and smarter kids. A 2008 study found that sustained intense interests, particularly in a conceptual domain like dinosaurs, can help children develop increased knowledge and persistence, a better attention span, and deeper information-processing skills.
They’re also particularly beneficial for cognitive development. Intense interests are a big confidence booster for kids, agrees Kelli Chen, a pediatric psychiatric occupational therapist at Johns Hopkins. Their parent may be able to name three or four dinosaurs and the kid can name 20, and the kid seems like a real authority.” “I think for many of these children, that’s their first taste of mastery, of being an expert in something and having command of something their parent or coach or doctor doesn’t know,” he says. “I hear it over and over” from parents, he says: ‘They know all the names! I don’t know how they remember that stuff.’” But Lacovara does, or at least he has some theories. Lacovara is currently the director of Rowan University’s Jean and Ric Edelman Fossil Park, and visiting parents constantly tell him about kids who are crazy for dinosaurs. He named the beast, which stood more than two stories tall and weighed more than a Boeing 737, Dreadnoughtus. In 2005, he discovered a giant plant-eating dinosaur in southern Patagonia.
Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara was a young boy with an intense interest in dinosaurs that never faded. The only difference is in the numbers: In 2016 alone there were more than 30 new dinosaurs discovered, bringing the list of potential favorites to more than 700. Land of the Lost may have inspired dino-fever in Generation X, and ’90s kids can trace it back to Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time, but an obsession with all things dinosaur is no less prevalent today than it was when you were a kid. And while studies have shown that the most common intense interest is vehicles - planes, trains, and cars - the next most popular, by a wide margin, is dinosaurs. Scientists call obsessions like Erin’s an “intense interest.” Researchers don’t know exactly what sparks them - the majority of parents can’t pinpoint the moment or event that kicked off their kids’ interest - but almost a third of all children have one at some point, typically between the ages of 2 and 6 (though for some the interest lasts further into childhood). The level of dinosaur expertise a kid can have is seriously astounding, particularly when you consider that the average adult can name maybe ten dinosaurs at best. They know the difference between the Mesozoic era and the Cretaceous period. They can tell you what these creatures ate, what they looked like, and where they lived. These kids can rattle off the scientific names of dozens, if not hundreds, of dinosaurs. As a near-universal rule, kids love dinosaurs - if you weren’t obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid, you almost definitely know someone who was. It’s like she can’t stop learning it all, and there’s always more for her to learn.” “There’s so much information, and she loves the long names of the dinosaurs and learning about the different prehistoric periods.
Alloway doesn’t remember what sparked it, but today her daughter’s favorite place is the large dinosaur section in their local public library: “She loves that it feels never-ending,” Alloway says. But she said it had to have real feathers, so I used a bajillion feathers, and nobody knew what she was, but she didn’t care.”Įrin’s devotion to dinosaurs started just after she turned 4. “There’s like two pictures of an Ozraptor. “I Googled it, and there’s nothing,” Alloway says. It’s also definitely not something a mom can buy off the rack at Party City. It couldn’t be just any dinosaur: Erin, 6, wanted to be an Ozraptor.įor the record, an Ozraptor is an abelisauroid theropod dinosaur that lived in modern-day Australia during the Middle Jurassic period. Susan Alloway’s daughter Erin was very specific about her Halloween costume.
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