All My Children

Few other types of play can quite compare with doll play for eliciting deep parental involvement. Still, there are many other aspects of children’s play which can affect a parent deeply, through recollections and other feelings it activates, particularly when a child’s play reminds the parent of having played with the same toy, or having played in similar fashion. Also, the older the child gets, the more easily do play activities echo not only the parent’s own childhood experiences, but also his present hobbies or recreations. For example, the teenager who can play a serious game of chess has an experience very similar to his parent’s in doing so. Empathizing with a child’s joys and sorrows in school or on the playing field and reliving one’s own experiences there is a common occurrence of parenthood; and it applies equally when a few short years later, one’s child goes through the throes and thrills of his first love. But by then, the youngster’s personality is largely formed, and he is struggling to fight free of being dominated by the parent. By the teenage years, the youngster is—or should be—too distinctly his own person for a parent to see or project much of himself and his own past into his play. While the teenager’s play—and other experiences—may evoke in the parent parallel experiences of his own life, he can no longer identify with his child as he could several years earlier.

Only during the early stages of personality formation, which is typically the age of most intensive doll play, can a mother fantasize that her daughter is like herself as a child, that the little girl will develop as a mother exactly in the way she hopes for, and avoid the pitfalls and dangers the mother herself perhaps couldn’t evade. Parents know that their children will most likely have a life quite different from their own, that only so long as the children are small can parents fully identify with them, and relive some of their own childhood experiences in play.

But as long as we can identify with our children in their play through such memories, this makes the play uniquely meaningful to both parent and child, and while our children are still very young, we can imagine that they will follow our common course in their future development.

Such positive identification with children’s play was much easier when the life activities of girls and boys repeated those of their parents. For example, playing with a hobbyhorse—like the doll, a very ancient toy—had an entirely different meaning in an era when horses were the principal means of transport and traction, not to mention their role in warfare. The child riding a hobbyhorse emulated important adult activities on a size-appropriate scale, and the parent watching him knew that he was preparing for important aspects of adult life. This knowledge could easily induce fantasies about the child’s future, and parents might have recalled the fantasies they entertained when they rode hobbyhorses. Such parents could also muse on the difference between these fantasies and the present reality, exactly as modern parents may respond to their children’s doll play or “astronaut” play.

Today, even if an adult is very fond of riding, it is now a leisure activity, which reduces its serious meaning. No longer is riding a horse or using it for work an important dimension in the life of most adults. With the exception of the slim ranks of cowboys and jockeys, it is a rare parent who, watching his child ride a hobbyhorse, thinks with pleasure about how well his child is preparing for success in life, or of how that life will resemble his own. Today parents accept the fact that it is unlikely that their children will follow in their footsteps.

With the older child, things may be somewhat different. Seeing a youngster at a computer, or playing a musical instrument, permits a parent to have pleasurable fantasies about the child’s future. Still, for most parents, their children’s academic achievements seem most likely to offer promise for future success. For this reason, many parents (without actually realizing their motivation) today push school achievement on their children at much too early an age, in nursery school, and even before! Parents believe this will promote their child’s progress once in grade school, but for everything in life there is a right and a wrong time; if we push a child to perform, or to succeed, more often than not this has the opposite effect. Teaching reading or math to children is unsuitable for most of them before the age of six or seven. While a child’s intellect can be stimulated at earlier ages, this is beneficial only if it is done in an age-appropriate fashion.

Unconsciously, through exposing their child to early academic experiences, parents wish to be able to anticipate their child’s future success; they derive pleasure from such thoughts, and they tend to allay any fears they may harbor in this regard. The main trouble with such early efforts is that they are premature, and thus often counterproductive. While it is true that most children can learn to read, write, count, and do simple mathematical computations at an early age, these activities usually have no intrinsic meaning for them, aside from the fact that performing them pleases their parents. The result may be that such academic activities will later continue to remain void of meaning for such children. However, it is only such intrinsic meaning that will motivate the child to devote himself to the kind of learning offered in elementary and high school. If a little child is pushed too early to do schoolwork, he does it only to please his parents. If so, later, when he is in conflict with them, he may be tempted to hurt them through academic failure. The less intrinsic meaning academic learning has for a child at first exposure, the more likely he is to abandon it later. It is much better to delay exposing the child to intellectual learning of an academic nature until he is mature enough for it, and his intellect sufficiently developed, for what he is learning to have considerable intrinsic meaning to him.

Many parents who wish to teach academics to their children at an early age try to do so in a playful manner, but for the child this is not play, although he may enjoy the parental attention. Some parents unconsciously view their child so much as part of themselves that they cannot imagine that what gives them pleasure, such as academic prowess, could have a very different effect on their child. The same phenomenon explains why other parents push athletic achievement on their children. They genuinely enjoy it and hence cannot comprehend that while the child enjoys giving pleasure to his parent, the activity may involve too much pressure, tension, exertion, and anxiety about failures for the child—that it is just too demanding a task for him. The child then faces a dilemma: he resents being put under pressure, but giving pleasure to his parent is so important to him that he cannot afford to let the parent know his true feelings.

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