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. Continue Reading »

Getting organized in a town

As contact is being made with the children by the street animator, three to four committed people willing to get something off the ground need to get together. Their first step is to identify the possible resources within the community and to communicate with these people and organisations with a view to calling a first meeting of concerned citizens. It should be made clear that the meeting is exploratory and that people do not commit themselves in any way by attending. Such resources could include the following:

• Child Welfare in the town and township;
• Two priests/ministers of religion (preferably belonging to a ministers’ fraternal) one in the town and the other in the township;
• A lower and higher primary school principal/teacher in the township;

Continue Reading »

Girls are as subject as boys to all kinds of frustrations, very much including sibling rivalry and anger at their parents, and so it would serve them equally well to be able to discharge their anger through symbolic play, as with toy guns. Furthermore it would prevent their feeling frustrated because an important type of symbolic play available to boys is not available to them. By playing with guns they too would get things out of their system. They would realize that boys are not advantaged in comparison to girls in this respect. Continue Reading »

Charity begins at home, and so does learning about aggression. A child will understand that shooting and killing people is wrong when the parent who was playfully made a target inquires who is going to pour the milk in the future or go to the store for ice cream. Such a question can convince a child of the need to keep his aggression under control in his own best interests, as no abstract description of the horrors of war could do. To be told that what we want to do—shoot the gun—is wrong annoys and frustrates us, and puts us on the defensive. But realizing things on the basis of one’s own experience and interest—that is, a parent who has been shot can no longer serve the child—makes the learning become positive. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Certainly parents are happy to see their children absorbed in play. But are they equally happy to become engrossed in the playing themselves? If a child’s play is pleasurable to a parent chiefly because he can then pursue his adult activities without feeling bad about neglecting his child, it does not take the child long to realize this. He soon learns that to his parents play itself is not very important, but his being out of their way is; this lesson simultaneously diminishes him and his enjoyment of play, and reduces the capacity of play to develop his intelligence and personality. Continue Reading »

On the other hand, such parallel investment in play can work well for a time and then backfire through adult motives. The following story is an illustration of the point, and it involves a partly happy but much more unhappy memory that haunted a highly successful man all his life. The man’s father was very much involved in stamp collecting, so the youngster needed little urging to become an avid stamp collector too. Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »