Does the concept of being awkward exist for three-year-olds?

Around age 5–6 is when self consciousness comes into play in child development.
Not sure you can explain something that has never been experienced, sort of like trying to describe chocolate to someone who has never tasted it. Maybe explain it as feeling uncomfortable, nervous, that others are paying close attention to you..

No, alone on an island awkward wouldn’t exist, the feeling can only exist in direct relation to feeling under the microscope of others.

Your child has a large vocabulary and is aware of the body in the world. You are a very lucky parent.

I don’t put much faith in psychology as a study, because my development didn’t follow the rules. My siblings, well, one, didn’t follow the rules. My offspring didn’t follow the rules. I can remember being in diapers. I remember a family funeral which took place in the rain. The day was cold and very dark. My mother stayed in the car during the burial to keep the baby out of the rain (me). I saw the crowd around the grave. It was a huge mass of bobbing, black umbrellas. One umbrella was yellow. I remember feeling it was pretty, but wrong for such a somber occasion. I thought of it various times over the years. One day, I asked my mom whose funeral it was. At first she didn’t know what I meant. Finally, when she realized I remembered a day from before my first birthday, she was stunned. Some kids “Get” things adults don’t realize. Within my family I have a library of such occurances. I will continue with your bonuses in a bit.

An awkward situation is usually a mutual desire or urge mixed with uneasiness. (Do we hug? Do we shake hands?)

Most people don’t think about whether a three year old wants a hug or kiss. You’re more likely to have an uncomfortable and unhappy toddler and an oblivious adult.

and why people think kiss-raping a toddler is ok is beyond me. No means no, even when you’re three.

Since three year olds do a lot of awkward things compared to older children and adults, it’s probably good they may not completely understand the concept. The toddler trial and error phase is so important, and what a shame many of us lose our ability or willingness to try things that might make us look awkward or be embarrassed. Around age 5, as @Coloma mentioned, which is also schoolage, children get shamed into performing more as society expects. Parent help train them along the way and tell kids the expectations of society, but children’s awareness of the rules get heightened when other children are around to tell them when they are doing something not socially acceptable. It’s a double edged sword. We want people to “behave” in society, because it helps us all be productive and live together in harmony, but we also shouldn’t be robots expectating everyone to be the same.

I guess I would tell a three year old awkward means when someone does something funny or unusual that most people don’t do. Feeling awkward is knowing you are doing something unusual and feeling different because of it.

Hi. I’m back. I would explain by first telling that nobody did anything wrong. I would let the child know that awkward is something which can happen to anybody. I would tell them that awkward is a weird goofy feeling people get, not really something they do, and that that feeling bothers grown ups more often than kids because kids don’t mind that feeling so much. It comes from being a little embarrassed, a little lost, a little frightened, and that bothers adults, but it is part of growing up and kids get that funny feeling a lot. Awkward happens when it’s someone’s turn to talk and they suddenly can’t think of what to say, or someone else’s rules are a little different and you’re not sure what’s okay. Lots of things happen to make the awkward feeling, but it doesn’t mean you are wrong, it just means you care lots about being not wrong. I would also stress that I am proud of my (the) child for being brave and smart enough to ask. Actually, I would also ask my child if they would mention to me in future if they feel awkward so I could help them sort it out and relax. That’s the job of protocol advisors, to smooth out the AaAaAaAawkwaaard. (Did that represent like sing song vocals?)
Alone on an island? Awkward could happen, with an overly self concious person, but I would expect that to abate with time, when it finally strikes them that absolutely no one is there to sit in judgement of them.

I don’t think they really “get” awkward. Here’s my working definition of awkwardness: the anxiety that comes when social interactions fail to follow conventional norms. Three-year-olds aren’t burdened with a lot of the social scripts that govern adult interactions. It wouldn’t occur to them that there are subjects that are off-limits, or that long silences in conversation are undesirable, or that privacy matters.

Until you learn that there are unspoken rules that prescribe how interactions are expected to unfold, then you don’t know that things aren’t going as they should. There is no “should”. When a social situation goes seriously off-script (the guy next to you in the elevator starts talking to himself, for example), adults get anxious because they don’t know what to do; the script has become useless. That anxiety is awkwardness. The adults will want things to get back on script so they don’t have to be in doubt about what to do.

Little kids find off-script stuff like this fascinating. Not knowing what to do is not the problem for them that it is for us because they aren’t aware of all the expectations. They just respond to these situations however they feel like responding. No knowing required.

Somewhere among my stored books I have two children’s dictionaries. They date from the period of my career when I worked in educational publishing. I carried them with me into the tech world because I loved the way they got right down to essentials and explained things in clear but simple language.

As you may imagine, a lot of words aren’t in there. But I’ll bet awkward is. Next time I run across them, I’ll look.

I think a three-year-old can understand being embarrassed or feeling foolish and out of place, even if she doesn’t have the language for it. My guess would be that any number of children’s stories and picture books address the experience in child’s terms; a preschool teacher or children’s librarian could probably steer you to them. How about Andersen’s story “The Ugly Duckling”?

Awkward is a socially derived construct. Some more intellectually advanced three-year-old children who have benefited from a linguistically enriched home environment have have an understanding of the concept to some degree. Awkward has more to do with how others people see you and make conclusions about you (even if they are incorrect) than it has to do with the way you act. Some intentional behaviours may be more likely to elicit such judgments. We can choose what to do and not to do so we can avoid unfair and incorrect judgments about us. Some people will still make unfair judgments no matter what we do. We don’t have to believe what they say and we don’t have to convince these people that they are wrong.

Probably not, because this complex feeling requires a more mature prefrontal cortex.

@trailsillustrated Thanks, but I’m not entirelysure she understands it yet.
She does have a pretty good vocabulary for a (now) four-year-old. Her favorite word of the moment is _ subjective_. She likes to go around and point out to people that their opinions are subjective. Ha.

@Jeruba I’d be definitely interested in what it would have to say.

@mattbrowne It does? I thought the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until you’re in your 20’s. You most definitely feel awkward before that!

@everyone Thanks guys. Neat to read everyone’s thoughts on this.

I think the crux for me is that I don’t want her to experience this any sooner than she has to because I’ve begun to put that seed in her head. It makes me think about eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. When I was younger , I didn’t understand that metaphor (sorry, that’s how I read it as someone who is not religious).