All My Children

If we truly took our child’s play as seriously as we take our own tasks, we would be as loath to interrupt it as we are reluctant to be interfered with when we are working. This is the pattern demanded by consistency and a sense of fairness; and one reward for thus respecting our child’s play is that it enhances his own sense of play as an important activity in the whole context of family life.

This is not to say that parents always take play lightly. After all, we want our children to enjoy themselves; we buy them toys and take them to the playground; we are conscientious about providing opportunities to play. Unfortunately, however, most parents devote themselves seriously only very selectively to a few aspects of their children’s play, and what they choose is more likely to be activities in which the child engages when quite a bit older. But underlying attitudes are largely formed early on, and the older child may already be suffering from the consequences of having his earlier play taken lightly. For example, if a chess-playing father and child are in the middle of a good game, or if a father is involved in his son’s Little League activities, the call to dinner is hardly ever answered promptly. The parent who fully participates in his child’s activity because of personal involvement has a perfect understanding of how important it is—and this participatory attitude is very different from being involved only as a parent. In the first instance, the parent will join his child in protesting that the game simply cannot be interrupted; in the second, he will insist that the child interrupt what he is doing and obey the call to come to dinner right away. The child observes this difference and is dejected when he realizes how rarely we take his play really seriously, and do so only when it is also important to us, never mind how important it is to him.

What a child explores in his various disorientation games, as exemplified earlier by Blind Man’s Buff, is of course no longer so important to adults, who have long since attained a good degree of mastery of this kind of confusion. Therefore we cannot expect to experience again the deep satisfaction our child derives from his investigation in play that answers these compelling issues of his life. But if we truly comprehend what such play means to him, then we can at the very least participate vicariously in his pleasure. We can enjoy his capacity to provide himself with meaningful experiences and feel respect for his attempts to find answers to the existential questions which beset him. Indeed, the issues of permanency of object and the intentions of others are among the enigmas of the play age, and are by no means limited only to early childhood.

Despite the importance of our encouragement of play, it is never beneficial for parents to play with their child strictly out of a sense of duty. To play because one “should” is simply not the same as playing together with one’s child, or even appreciating the importance of his play. This confusion about the parent’s intent is precisely what mars so much of the child’s play. Many adults, whether parent or teacher, tend to play with children for purposes outside the play; they may wish to distract, entertain, educate, diagnose, or guide them. But this is not what the child desires. Unless the play itself is the thing, it loses much of its meaning to the child and adult participation becomes offensive; the child can guess the adult’s purpose and becomes annoyed at the pretense of wholehearted participation.

The use of educational toys, so dear to the hearts of many parents, may serve as an illustration. There is really nothing much wrong with educational toys—if the emphasis is entirely on the enjoyment of play and not on the intent of educating. Such toys become problematic, however, when parental emphasis is placed on what using the toy supposedly teaches the child, rather than on however the child himself wants to use it. Educational toys become absolutely deadly when the child is expected to learn what they are designed to teach, instead of learning what he wants to learn by playing with them as his fancy of the moment suggests. A child must be able to use any toy the way he wishes to, not as the parent, teacher, or manufacturer thinks it ought to be used.

It is amazing what an infant can learn just by playing with the cardboard core of a roll of toilet paper, and how constructive, imaginative, and educative a child’s play with empty boxes can be. In earlier days, when twine came on wooden spools, young children used the spools as blocks and gained as much pleasure and learning from them as they do now out of speciallyconstructed building blocks. Indeed, they probably got something more out of playing with spools than they do from blocks, since they knew that the wooden cores had an important function in the adult sewing enterprises of their mothers. Thus both child and parent found something important represented in wooden spools, whereas blocks are important only to the child.

Some parents spontaneously realize the value of having a personal investment in their child’s play objects, although they are not always consciously aware that this is what motivates them. Instinctively they add a new measure of mutuality to their child’s pleasure, without setting out purposely to do so. With their greater leisure and their own enjoyment of craft activities, these parents may have the time and inclination to fashion toys for their children, thereby duplicating what their own parents or grandparents did out of necessity. Such parents create an experience through which they become emotionally involved in the toy they have created with their own hands. They get enormous enjoyment not only from the task, but also from imagining how their child will play with these toys. The meaning the parents have invested in the toy remains active as they play with their child or watch his play.

Other parents make the production of toys a common project. For example, with the child’s help they collect scraps of wood. In doing so they both contemplate what forms they will give these bits and pieces. Together they sand the wood, and perhaps the child invites some of his friends to help with this labor and with the painting and the shellacking that follows. From then on and ever after these blocks are very special to child and parent. No store-bought blocks can compare in importance with these visible and tangible examples of the child’s and the parent’s common investment in a toy.

What counts here is mutuality: both parent and child are invested in the blocks, although out of quite different motives. This common bond of emotional investment can go a long way toward making up for the fact that the parties are not equally involved in the child’s play with the product of their labor. .

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