A child below a certain age does not recognize purpose, for them everything 'just is' as the universe 'just is' for atheists. They sleep in a bed because it's comfortable, they eat candy because it tastes good, it takes a little more critical thought to realize that these things could only exist by being made with that specific purpose in mind
Actually, the information I have obtained states exactly opposite: that preadolescent children seem to attribute a purpose to everything they encounter; as in, "the lake at the bottom of the mountain is there
so that the animals can get a drink of water"; not, "Well, the lake was there because of the laws of physics and precipitation runoff gathered there because we know that water flows downhill".
Recent findings certainly suggest that children and adults
share strong similarities in their functional construal of arti-
facts and biological parts. Importantly, for example, both
preschoolers and adults constrain their reasoning about the
functions of artifacts and biological parts by considering
their origin. Thus, when children and adults are shown
novel body parts and artifacts that were designed for one
thing but intentionally or accidentally used for some other
activity, they agree that the object is ‘for’ the activity it was
originally designed (either by nature or intention) to perform
However, the similarities extend further than this. Con-
sistent with the proposal that, from an early age, children have
an adult-like sensitivity to different functional relations in the
artifact and biological realms, Keil finds that, when presented
with comparable features on a biological part and an artifact,
even three-year-olds consider the biological part as ‘self-serving’
but the parallel part on an artifact as ‘other serving’
. Thus,
young children know that while a barb on a rose is good for
the rose, a barb on barbed wire is good for someone else.
A final similarity is that, like adults, young children draw
on teleological assumptions about functional design in order
to constrain their inferences about unfamiliar living things.
In one study, three-, four- and five-year-old children were
taught behavioral properties of two animals and were
then
asked which behavioral property applied to an unfamiliar
third animal (a creature that shared overall similarity with one
of the training animals but was dissimilar to the other with
which it shared only a specific functional trait). The study
found that, from three years of age, children preferentially
attended to common functional features, rather than overall
similarity, when making inductions about the behavior of
the novel animal (D. Kelemen, D. Widdowson, T. Posner,
A.L. Brown and T. Dennis, unpublished) (see Fig. 2).
Taken together, these findings generate support for the
contention that children have an adult-like teleological sense
when reasoning about the biological and artifact domains.
However, the picture is, of course, more complicated than
this. Other studies have also found significant differences in
the teleological intuitions of children and adults – differences
that suggest caution when using the tendency of children to
engage in purpose-based thought as a basis for attributing
an autonomous biology.
http://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2013/08/1999_Kelemen_FunctionsGoalsIntentions.pdf
