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 »

These factors, although given in summary form, are also found elsewhere, for example, the Philippines. Bearing in mind the comments of Vanistendael that the phenomenon of street children is not due to any single factor, but to a combination of elements and influences, let us look at some of the other factors in our South African situation which contribute to the phenomenon of street children. The list is not exhaustive in any way: Continue Reading »

Transition homes in the community

This is an area where it is extremely difficult to succeed. Because of the stigma attached to the street children, people in the community generally fear to accommodate them in their own homes. There is a tremendous need to educate the community in this regard; already the project held its first seminar in the township to make people aware of the street children’s plight and of its difficulties in finding transition homes, before the children can return to their own families. The project has also approached the churches for transition homes, but failed to obtain a positive response! As a result, it applied to the local township council and was given a piece of land to erect a transition home but funds are needed to build such a home to accommodate the children. Continue Reading »

Getting started in a town

To state the obvious, one needs to identify the whereabouts of street children in a town and to try and establish how many there are. The usual places to find them during the day are the supermarkets where they will volunteer to push trolleys, the taxi ranks where they will wash taxis, parking areas where they will offer to wash cars, etc. It is important to remember the five `categories’ because, for instance, although part-time working children are street children, their situation differs from runaways or abandoned children. Part- time working children who attend school and sleep at home in the evenings are not a ‘problem’ as such, although care needs to be taken that they do not become full-time working children or runaways. 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 »

Years later, after his father’s death, the son became much more successful in his profession than his father had ever been. But he still had a hard time fighting his feelings of inferiority, the seeds of which, he was convinced, had been planted in this shattering experience. Afterward, he could never again trust himself when he thought he was doing well. Most of his memories of his father were a combination of a nostalgic desire for the paradise he had enjoyed before his father became convinced it was time to introduce him to the adult levels of stamp collecting, and his resentment over being suddenly criticized and made to feel inferior. Continue Reading »

Some children keep score on their ability to exercise this type of self- control, and they know very well that the issue is the ability of their mind, or will, consciously to dominate the spontaneous reactions of their body. These games are so common that one may assert that all children, at one time or another, engage in games whose main purpose is to test themselves and their performance. I knew one six-year-old, for example, who kept score through checking off one of two columns which he had labeled “Me” and “My mind,” indicating that for him the issue was not whether he or his partner won, but how well his mind could control his body. 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 »

Piaget stresses the importance of the child’s learning the rules of the game in the process of socialization because he must become able to control himself in order to do so, controlling most of all his tendency to act aggressively to gain his goals. Only then can he enjoy the continuous back-and-forth interaction with others that is involved in playing games with partners who simultaneously are also opponents. Continue Reading »