Abstract
One summer morning, while waiting for the elusive bluefish to appear in the Cape Cod surf, I noticed my fishing partners, a friend and his young son, were doing more talking than fishing. The boy, frustrated by the summer heat and the absence of fish, began asking his father a series of questions. Among other things he inquired about the rising tide and waning moon. The father, unusually patient, offered his son careful and simply-worded explanations, apparently pleased with the image of his son as a budding naturalist. After hearing about the ebb and flow of the tides in some scientific detail, the boy looked at his father and posed one last question, “But Daddy why does the water want to do that?”
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Shirk, S.R. (1988). Causal Reasoning and Children’s Comprehension of Therapeutic Interpretations. In: Shirk, S.R. (eds) Cognitive Development and Child Psychotherapy. Perspectives in Developmental Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3635-6_3
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