The young daughter of a NASA research scientist is making a big bang on social media.
“My daughter’s ‘scientific proof’ that she loves me more than I love her (an going debate between us) is that my heart is full of other experiences whereas hers is less so, so there’s more room for love for me,” Jessie Christiansen, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "I'm actually kind of impressed."
The little girl, named Clara, drew two hearts to illustrate her point. Clara’s heart is devoted to her parents; her mom and dad make up a huge part of her world. Christiansen’s also includes family, but way more “experienses.”
“Preceding this diagram, I thought I had come up with a good argument, which was that my heart is physically larger than her heart because I’m an adult and she’s a child,” Christiansen tells TODAY.com. “And her comeback was that even if my heart is larger, fractionally more of her heart is devoted to me.”
Clara’s diagram went viral after it was shared on the Tank Good News Instagram account.
“She casually developed a philosophical theory,” one person wrote in the comments.
Added another, “It adds up. Give her a Nobel.”
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Clara was 8 when she crafted the diagram in 2023. She and her twin brother, Hugo, are now 9-years-old and in third grade.
“She really thought it through. It was so logical,” Christiansen says of Clara’s drawing. “She considered the relative size of all these things that might be competing for my affection.”
Christiansen’s husband Philip Hopkins is a professor of theoretical astrophysics, which makes for interesting conversations at the dinner table.
“Our poor kids, they’re growing up in a house where logic and argument are a part of life,” Christiansen says. “We’ve taught them that when someone makes a statement, it’s their job to challenge it.”
“It’s a very different parenting style from say, my parents and me, so my mom will hear the kids argue back and she feels that they’re being disrespectful,” Christiansen explains. “But we should always be debating. ‘Because Mommy said so’ isn’t the answer to anything.”
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
