All My Children

Parents who do not consider that the child’s pleasure may not be parallel or equal to their own can create serious problems for him. An example of this can be observed in roughhousing play between parents and children. Children usually enjoy such play, but only up to a point. Most infants and small children enjoy being thrown up into the air and caught, if this is done with moderation and great care, and not for too long. Such limited play reassures them that they can safely lose contact for a moment with their parent without danger; further, it gives them confidence that their parents can turn potentially dangerous situations into safe ones. But some parents, carried away by the pleasure such roughhousing gives them and unable to imagine that something so enjoyable to them may be frightening to the child, go far beyond what is pleasurable for him. And when things get too exciting for the child, the excitement can become overwhelming and arouse fears:

There is also the kind of rough-and-tumble in which a parent wrestles his child down or shadow-boxes with him, enjoying his own strength and superior athletic abilities; often he firmly believes that what he enjoys so much his child must enjoy equally. But the child’s pleasure soon becomes mixed with the experience of inadequacy in relation to the parent, anxiety about his comparative weakness and his utter dependency on the parent, and fear that the parent will become dangerously carried away by his dominance. So what began as an enjoyable experience ends up overwhelming the child with anxiety and feelings of defeat. The parent feels confident in his knowledge that he will not take advantage of his superior strength and believes that what he knows, the child knows, too. But this is not the case; all the child knows is that it has become too much for him.

This is why a parent’s participation in play which his child has chosen all on his own is so much safer and more rewarding to both parents and child. If, in addition, such play stimulates parental recollection of similar childhood play and permits happy fantasies about the child’s future, then it provides an eminently constructive and happy experience for all concerned. A mother’s playing with her child at dolls is a paradigm of such play. The loving manner in which a girl takes care of her dolls seems to promise to her parents that she will be a good mother and gain much satisfaction, fulfillment and pleasure from it.

Parents who make a positive investment in their children’s play instill in them the secure feeling that when they are grown up, they will be well able to meet the tasks of adult life. This confidence is born at the moment when the child feels that he is playing well, and his parents‘ satisfaction is an important element of this feeling. Parental encouragement of play and parental commitment to play’s immediate importance for children solidifies the role of play in preparing the child for the future.

Until very recently, when a girl played with dolls or at taking care of a house and a family, she was much closer to the activities that filled much of her mother’s adult life, and to what both her parents expected her future would hold. Today, with work outside of the home having become a central role in most American women’s lives, this is no longer true; and it is even less true now for boys who play with soldiers, trucks, or toy trains.’

In their typical play, most boys are apt to manipulate toys which represent objects (cars, airplanes) and do so aggressively, while girls tend to play at taking care of toys (dolls), which represent people. Thus a boy may be more apt to get lost in abstractions and relate aggressively to the world rather than caringly. But this does not need to be so; if the boy’s parents relate caringlyrather than critically—even to the boy’s aggressive play, then such caring attitudes will instill parallel attitudes in the boy. And many a little boy is as tender as his sister when he dresses and undresses his stuffed animals, bathes them, and puts them to sleep.

Therefore I believe these sets of characteristics are not wholly or even primarily sex-related, but basically a question of cultural conditioning. In imitation of her mother, a girl’s play is much more directed toward caring for people, and it is personal interactions that determine the nature of much of our day-to-day reality. Furthermore, under modern conditions of life the girl has much more opportunity to watch her mother in her mothering and homemaking activities and help with them, even if these are done only after she comes home from work, than a boy has for observing his father and participating in his central adult activities. Helping his father with the chores around the house on a weekend or going with him on a fishing trip cannot compare in intensity and importance with watching one’s mother every day, or at least every evening, and helping her with her chores. Even if the mother is gone much of the day, the little girl gets the same opportunity to observe her usually female caretaker. Recreating in play what her mother does and helping her out with it in actuality provide yet another set of experiences to anchor a female firmly in everyday reality and prepare her to cope with its demands.

The better a child comprehends his parents‘ occupation as meaningful on a level he can understand, preferably from his own experience, the more he will emulate in play what he considers to be important aspects of his parents‘ lives. From their own experiences, children know how important the work of some adults is, such as that of teachers, ministers, physicians, and nurses. Children whose parents are not engaged in occupations like these will nevertheless play at being doctors and nurses, partly because it permits them to explore each other’s bodies, and partly because of the importance these professions have for them when they are ill. Although all children play at these occupations, if one or both parents are engaged in such work, this will make the play much more significant for both parent and child, because it facilitates mutual identification.

The child of an artist, say a painter, can observe what his parent is doing, and can believe he really understands what his parent is working at if he also paints. And that parent will be much more involved in his child’s dabbling with finger paints or brush than many others. With the computer fast making it possible for many more parents to work at home, one may hope that much of the damage which industrialization did to the intimate life of parents and children may be partly undone. Although what a parent does with the computer will be a closed book to the small child, as he grows older, he will be much better able to understand the work life of his parent.

It is to be hoped that future social development and technology—such as the computer—will permit parents to do more of their work at home. If so, their work, about which most children know only from hearsay, would become much more real to them. Even more important, their parents at work would become to them as real as today only their parents at home or at leisure are. With it the lives of parents and children in their entirety would become real to each other. It is to be hoped that this would help parents to understand and accept that the child’s world of play is as real and important to the child as is the world of work to the parent, and that therefore it ought to be accorded the same dignity.

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