All My Children

A child become familiar with material things and their properties as he plays with them; thus he masters objects and they become acceptable to him. This is why playing with his food is so important to the infant, and why he tries to feed the person who is feeding him. Through handling the food it becomes familiar to the infant; it becomes truly his food. The more he mashes it, the safer he feels it is and the more pleasant to ingest. By feeding his mother, he demonstrates to himself that he is not just the passive recipient of food but also its active dispenser; mastering the process of feeding makes eating all the more enjoyable.

Who feeds whom is one of the first contests the child engages in; it is based on the most tender, happy feelings. An infant who has negative feelings about his food or about the person who feeds him—although at an early age he can hardly separate the two—will resist being fed and fight those who try to make him eat; moreover he will have no desire to feed others.

Around the infant’s first relation, which is to the mothering person, and around the earliest experience, which is that of being fed, the most positive contest can occur, or the most negative, culminating in the infant’s refusal to be fed. The positive playful contest is desirable and beneficial, and the negative contest is destructive, but both are efforts at self-assertion. If he is not defeated in these contests, either type can add to the child’s self-esteem. However, when he is defeated in these early contests, the experience will have serious detrimental consequences for his self-esteem and ability to relate to others.

When self-esteem is the result of contests in which the competing partners are positively related to each other, then there are no losers but only winners.

When the child, because he enjoys being fed so much, wishes to provide his mother with the same experience, both are winners. These contests will have only happy connotations; they form the basis for good relations with others. In contrast, it is very difficult to develop any self-esteem even around successful self-assertion through fighting against undesirable experiences, such as when the infant spits out food which he is fed in a manner unacceptable or offensive to him. Whatever esteem can be gained from such negative self-assertion will have, at best, defensive connotations and become the basis for efforts to retain and strengthen it in solitary ways, rather than through good relations with others.

Another major source of self-esteem is the infant’s experience that he can do things—handle objects, make them do as he desires, and make his body do things for him, such as when he learns to crawl. Here, as throughout childhood, fundamental to the infant’s self-esteem is the approval, admiration, and love of the people most important to him. Later the child’s knowledge and mastery of objects become relatively secure through play, and he understands better what he can do. He becomes progressively more interested and better equipped to enjoy also the more advanced forms of mastery games can provide—a mastery achieved through contests. Engaging in solitary play and playing games with others will henceforth alternate, depending on opportunities and the needs or predilections of the moment.

The older the child gets, the more his development of self-esteem rests on succeeding in real and game-situation contests, very much including those in which he competes with his own past performances, or in which one aspect of his personality competes with others for dominance. It is then that games become ever more important as experiences, and for the development of the child’s personality. Through playing games he can demonstrate to himself and others how much he can do, how well he can perform intellectually and physically. Through his victory he will gain admiration— or so he hopes—which will increase his self-esteem.

While play can be and often is solitary, games imply some sort of companionship, as indicated by the Old Saxon and Gothic word gaman, meaning “fellowship,” from which the word is derived. The modern word “game” can refer to any kind of playing, but its particular meaning, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, is “any specific amusement or sport involving physical or mental competition under specific rules” and, to emphasize that these are two very different kinds of competition, there is added in parenthesis “Football and chess are games.” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary expresses the same idea by offering this definition: “A diversion of the nature of a contest, played according to rules, and decided by superior skill, strength, or good fortune.” Thus contest is the essence of games, and winning is thedesired goal; this much is clear. That the child tries to gain and prove his competence through competing is hardly surprising, since both words are derived from the same Latin source, competere, which has among other meanings that of “to strive for (something) together with another.”

What is not so obvious is that often the most important element of competition in games is the inner contest between different aspects of one’s personality. If the particular mastery one seeks to attain through playing games is over oneself—and with it the self-esteem which can be derived from it—this goal is camouflaged by competition with others, whose main importance is then to serve as a foil or standard against which the individual measures himself. The feeling of self-esteem which one gains through games involving some contest—having played well and won—is usually much more important than the defeat of the competitor, and is often the main incentive for playing a game in the first place.

Consider the contests in which young children engage, particularly during the earlier stages of game-playing. They stare at each other, and the first to wink or laugh is the loser; they compete to see who can hold his breath longer; or they squeeze each other’s hand to see who can suffer the pain without flinching. On the surface, it seems that the purpose of such contests is to win out over the other, but on a more important level, the mastery which is sought and^-tested is over oneself: to find out about and demonstrate one’s endurance, to control one’s involuntary emotional expressions and physical reactions. Much more significant than showing superiority over the antagonist is the self-esteem one achieves through such mastery over oneself.

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