Who Builds Things? The Question a Child Answers by Age Six

Read a child a story about a person who is “really, really smart” and then show them pictures and ask which one it was. At five, girls pick a woman and boys pick a man, each their own kind. At six, the girls have stopped. One year. That is the window, and it closes before most families have thought about it.

NAEYC’s position statement on equity asks educators to notice exactly this kind of shift and to act on it, and the years before six are where a child decides who builds things. Here is what the statement says, what the study found, and how to choose the books that go on the shelf before the door closes.

Who builds things: what NAEYC says about bias

NAEYC’s 2019 position statement, Advancing Equity in Early Childhood Education, is blunt about where bias lives. It is not only in society; it is in the adults in the room, and it starts early. The statement’s recommendation to educators is a habit of attention:

“Early childhood educators can recognize and support each child’s unique strengths, seeking through personal and collective reflection to avoid biases–explicit or implicit–that may affect their decision making related to children.”

NAEYC, Advancing Equity in Early Childhood Education, position statement, 2019, p. 5

The statement names the biases it means, “based on race, class, culture, gender, sexual orientation, ability and disability, language, national origin, indigenous heritage, religion, and other identities” (NAEYC, 2019, p. 4), and it asks programs to “take action when outcomes vary significantly by social identities,” giving as one example “engagement with certain materials and activities by gender” (p. 6). Who reaches for the blocks, who builds things and who does not, is, in NAEYC’s words, an outcome to watch. The research base on implicit bias in early childhood settings “is growing,” the statement notes, and “teachers of young children, like all people, are not immune to such bias” (p. 15). Neither are the books on the shelf.

What the 2017 study found

The window in the opening comes from a study published in Science in 2017 by Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Andrei Cimpian. Children aged five to seven heard a story about a very smart person and were asked to guess who it was. At five, both girls and boys tended to pick their own gender. By six, girls were less likely to associate brilliance with their own gender than boys were, and the same six-year-old girls began to avoid a game described as being for “really, really smart” children (Bian, Leslie, and Cimpian, 2017). One year separates the two answers. By second grade the moves required to undo a belief like that are larger and more deliberate. A toddler has not formed the belief yet. They are still gathering evidence, and every book is evidence.

A book that meets the goal

This is pre-stereotype work, not anti-stereotype work. The goal is not to undo a belief a child has already formed. It is to keep it from forming. A child who never lands on “only people who look like X build things” has nothing to unlearn. So the library of “people who make things” has to look every way, and the cast of Kit’s Little Sparks is built that way across 20 books. Kit and Sparks are joined by nineteen other kid inventors: Naya, Bao, Marco, Bolt, Sam, Suki, Devi, Priya, Ren, Zara, Josie, Elias, Milo, Bloom, Ama, Layla, Ember, Lily, and Kit’s little sister Mia. Milo wears hearing aids some days and not others. Nobody in the books remarks on it. Boys cry. Girls build. Sometimes both happen on the same page. Failure happens often, and to everyone.

Book 18 is the most direct. Its subtitle is “People Just Like You Changed the World,” and that is the whole book. Ember, a small phoenix, fans her feathers and shows Kit inventors from every era and every corner of the world, including a child his own age at a simple desk. Kit looks at them, then at his own reflection. Same spark.

How the book meets what the standard asks for. NAEYC asks educators to watch for outcomes that vary by identity, including which children reach for which materials, and to support each child’s strengths without bias. A shelf where every kind of body shows up in the people-who-make-things category is the earliest version of that watchfulness: it shapes the default before a child has one. Book 18 makes the point in a single question you can ask after reading it, “Who in this book looks like you?”, and the answer is usually a finger on a page.

Chris Kuczynski wrote about the same window for families on the Little Sparks site in Stereotype Threat Is Real by Age 6. This post is the classroom side of that conversation. A school’s commitment to raising courageous and compassionate leaders starts with who a child believes can lead.

What you can do

The window is one year wide. The shelf is the easiest thing in the house to change tonight, and it is where a child learns who builds things.

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