The Pineapple Thief, A Story About Means-End Analysis

I'd seen my brothers son Jalen do many things but I'd never seen him take a want/need (pineapple) and make a plan to acquire it. After reading chapter 10 and coming across the means-end analysis, this was the first thing to come to mind.

Children are problem solvers; I'm confident in saying that. But I was surprised to what degree someone as small as 2 years old could go to in order to achieve their overall goal. The situation involved me going over to my brothers house for dinner, I wasn't the only person, it was some sort of family get together. The pizza had just arrived and everyone was sitting around the living room eating. Enter Jalen (his 2ish year old son at the time).

Jalen was a pineapple hound growing up. If there was pineapple on anything he wanted all of it. So naturally one of the pizzas was Hawaiian style. O.k., so Jalen got his normal piece of pizza, picked off the pineapple, ate it, left the rest of the pizza alone and started his rounds. Walking up to everyone, he would body up to your leg and just peer at your plate, if you had pineapple on your pie he would stick around until you made an offering to him. No pineapple equalled no Jalen and he would move on.

So Jalen had made the rounds and no one had pineapple left to offer. He knew what the pizza boxes looked like and he made his way to the kitchen. Sitting atop the dinning room table (which he could see through the clear glass table) was his holy grail, the pizza boxes, and they were left alone unguarded. But the little guy can't reach them, because what do you do when a 2 year old wants something and you don't want him to get it, you put it on top of the table so he can't get reach it.

I remember looking back at him and making a comment to someone about how weird it was that he was just standing looking up at the pizza boxes. Looking back on the situation Jalen must have been making a mental model of what he needed to do to boost his height and reach those boxes. Using a means-end analysis he plotted out his next move.

I'd seen Jalen climb atop a dinning room chair a million times. But only when they were sitting out in the open of the living room, and usually it happened when a lot of people were around to oh and ah about how brave he was to climb up like that. So him getting up on a chair really was no big thing.

Jalen had a plan he just needed to execute. Step one was to get a chair, no easy feat because they were all occupied. He got one though. Step two, move the chair back to the dining room. Once again, not that easy, they are fairly heavy chairs. Step three, position said chair in a way so he could climb up and still be able to reach the top of the table. Step four was simply to claim his prize. Jalen did just that, he claimed all the pineapple off the pizza.

When something like that happens you don't really think about what is going on, you just think about how cute that was. But what is really going on is this little 2 year old is acquiring the processes necessary to deal with life's little obstacles, be it acquiring pineapple like he did, or something larger and more important later in life. He came up with a plan and executed in the proper manner to reach his goal. If that's not using means-end analysis I don't know what is.