All My Children

The more opportunity a child has to enjoy the richness and freewheeling fantasy of play in all its forms, the more solidly will his development proceed. Later encounters with learning, games, and sports will strengthen and enhance his knowledge and mastery of the world. But for games and sports, or even for learning to be fully meaningful, his prior experience with play must already have provided a firm foundation. This is why culturally deprived children who had little chance to play and were little played with by parents have such a hard time in school—without the experience of succeeding in play, they do not trust themselves to succeed in school. For this reason, it is not sufficient for parents to wait to share in play activities when they reach a more formalized stage. The older child’s activities may offer more intrinsic interest to a parent, but by that time it may be too late. Both kinds of experience—play and games—are necessary for growing up well. Children lose out on a great deal if TV viewing or even activities such as academic learning prevent them from having rich experiences with both play and games. The ability to enjoy games builds on the play experience.

For example, there is little wrong with a game such as Co to the Head of the Class; it is entertaining and educational. But it won’t help a child master the school experience; it merely repeats and formalizes that experience. Mastering the school experience needs to be accomplished through the more imaginative channels of early play. A child just entering kindergarten may line up his stuffed animals in a row and “teach” them. Or he may conduct “classes” for his preschool siblings. By doing so, he is actively learning to master an experience which he has been passively subjected to during the school day. He acts out the teacher’s role, which makes her more acceptable and understandable as a person, an instructor, and an imposer of discipline. If he can play the teacher, he will find it easier to tolerate the teacher-student relationship and can therefore use positively most of his experiences in school.

The value of fantasy repetition in mastering difficult reality experiences is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in playing school, and here the parent, if he plays his child’s eager pupil, can prove a great boon. Parents are the ideal “pretend” pupils, because they can^- demonstrate to the child that even adults can accept passive learning without losing face. But if parents aren’t available as pupils, the young child is probably better off teaching his dolls or stuffed animals than trying to teach his younger siblings. The danger is that if the younger children fail to learn, the child who plays teacher may feel defeated; and if they object to his overbearing or impatient behavior, he will have difficulty mastering in play what he may have experienced in reality.

Here again, parents should avoid becoming conscious educators. For example, parents may want to help a child learn the multiplication tables— a difficult task for many a youngster to solve. The parent asks: “How much is six times seven?” When the child does not come up with the right answer, the parent corrects him, which gives him a feeling of defeat and failure. The child’s experience could be quite different, however, if the parent were to reverse roles and ask the child to pose a problem. When he asks the questions, the possibility of defeat is obviated. After the parent has given the right answer so often that he’s sure it is firmly engraved in the child’s mind, then the time has come for the parent to make an occasional “mistake.” The more outrageous the mistake, the more it will be enjoyed by the child, who will not believe for a moment that 6,742 can possibly be a correct solution to six times seven, though he might discover both the problem and the right answer within the number.

Such play puts the child into the driver’s seat; through it, he becomes much more active in learning, which is as it should be. No longer is he the passive supplier of correct answers—instead, asking the questions is a pleasant game. Eventually this can be varied by parent and child taking turns at asking the questions, but only with problems that the child has fully mastered so that no experience of defeat is possible.

The child who has to think problems to pose to his parent is much more concentrated on this activity—which includes figuring out whether the parent is giving the right answer—than the one who has been subjected to an examination camouflaged as help in learning the multiplication tables. No matter what the specifics of the situation, any parent who concerns himself with helping his child to play out school experiences, whether real or imagined, instead of trying to teach him, will be aiding his child’s progress in school most productively.

Practically any human activity can lend itself to misuse in the service of defensive pathology, or for compulsive purposes. But the fact that it can do so has little bearing on its real nature. We know that very neurotic children develop play rituals to feel protected thereby from terrible dangers which otherwise might befall them. But it would be erroneous to conclude that this is the universal rationale for ritual play.

For example, we probably all recall the walking rituals of our childhood. We walked along ledges, stepped only on certain squares of the pavement, or made ourselves walk as close to the walls of buildings as possible. Perhaps we had to step on all the cracks in the sidewalk, or on none of them; or we had to set one foot exactly in front of the other at every step, or after so many steps to turn ourselves around, repeating some secret formula. Walking play like this is of such ancient nature and universal persistence that it has outlasted empires, social systems, and religions. Despite this fact, spontaneous childhood rituals have been little studied.

There seems, in fact, to be serious misapprehension about the true meaning of walking rituals. Psychoanalysis tends to explain them as compulsive efforts to bind anxiety, but this interpretation—while pertinent in some instances—fails to do justice to the importance of this play for all children. Walking rituals appear to be a normal and ubiquitous phenomenon, despite the possibility of neurotic elaboration. These rituals seem simple at first glance but have some remarkable aspects. One is their widespread appearance and persistence at a certain age level, without social pressure or adult encouragement. Equally interesting is the fact that most children, after they reach a certain age, spontaneously give up this type of play, with the notable exception of pathologically compulsive children, who may carry obsessive behavior into adulthood.

Walking rituals may be better understood as an experiment in and demonstration of self-mastery, a proof of one’s capacity to command one’s own activity. The child learns that he has some control, if not yet of the outside world, at least of his own actions within it. Rituals like these are completely the child’s own spontaneous invention; the very essence of the activity is that the rules must be self-chosen and self-imposed. Details may be copied from other children, and may change from moment to moment as the walker decides. What must never change is that the rules are self-set, and that the child is convinced that obeying them will achieve “magical” results. Anyone else’s notion about the rules of play will be rejected. If his pattern is to step on none of the cracks, the child will respond with an incredulous stare to a suggestion that he pervert it by stepping on all the cracks.

The “magical” dimension of the play is in the feeling the child gets from it that although he is a mere child, subject to the restrictions of the adult world, he suddenly becomes his own master. He himself has set his task; and he also executes it by himself, with no one’s help. What greater magic is there than to use a simple device meaningless to anyone else, and by that very device deliver oneself from a life of bondage to a life of freedom? It is a wonderful secret, all the more exciting because no one else can guess at it, especially adults.

Within a young child’s reality such activities are not childish, but are the most mature of all for one reason: they permit him to be captain of his fate. The feeling of potency the child derives from this sense of self-mastery convinces him that he is master, in a fashion, of his seeming masters—the adults who don’t even know what he’s really doing. Hence the rhyme “Step on a crack, break my mother’s back.” That which magically gives the child power over himself at the same time gives him power over his parents.

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