Tackling a Challenge

From Kit Finn (VA):

It’s very hard to identify what our children use fantasy for because they never do anything that doesn’t have fantasy content. Even eating breakfast has a plot line. Life is never at all prosaic at our house.

But I can think of some occasions on which the fantasy that is a constant background to everything they do has made it easier for them to tackle a challenge. Danette spent a lot of time this spring on roller skates, learning how to be really at home on them. She didn’t go out of our yard and join the neighborhood kids until she could skate with skill. This is unusual as she generally dives right in and learns as she goes. But at 10 she is beginning to be aware that it can be embarrassing to do things badly in public. She found the practicing very dull. She doesn’t normally like to play alone. But the fantasy of being able to skate well with her friends got her through it. She was acting like an adult in this — setting her goal and heading for it step by step.

More usual is something Socorro did this year. She was 6 and hadn’t yet learned to read. Since we have to submit test results every year I was beginning to be a little concerned when she continued not to read at all. I suggested a little reading together, but she wasn’t willing to do any reading herself. She would giggle and tell me, “Mommy, you know I can’t read.” Well, round about Easter she announced one day that her doll didn’t know enough about letters and sounds and proceeded to spend a lot of time for a few weeks on phonics with me. Of course, she never once admitted she was learning to read. The doll had to be present at every session. When it came to herself we just went straight from “of course I can’t” to “reading is easy.”

I do want to emphasize that this kind of plot line is present in every activity. The vast majority of the time it doesn’t seem to serve any use beyond pleasure. When we do housework they are often the three girls from Little House on the Prairie. But this does not mean they are more willing to work. Bridget can be just as balky about picking up her room when she is being Laura as when she is being herself. And there are times when I think the plot line makes life harder. Bridget goes through this cycle with her violin. She will work very hard to get better for a while and then hit a plateau where she seems pretty satisfied with her skill. Then she will chance to hear a better violinist play and become very unhappy with her own level of skill. And then we’ll have sheer hell for a few days with Bridget growling at her violin and herself in utter frustration because she “can’t make it sing.” The reason I say this is negative is that she actually progresses faster during the happy times simply because she does much more playing then. If she is happy about her sound she will spend hours playing around with sounds and trying to write music. But during the frustration periods she spends most of her violin time on temper and puts it away very quickly.

I tend to think that we all have some sort of fantasy going on just about all the time. Children are more open about their fantasies; adults keep them more to themselves. Children also let their imaginations roam a bit farther. But I think I have some sort of image in my mind all the time that has a lot to do with my actions. It may be a picture of myself as a “good mother” or a picture of my husband complimenting me on a clean house or a good dinner. I think we all have a plot line to our lives.

Understanding Through Play

From Aaron Falbel’s work-in-progress about the Danish Friskolen 70 (see GWS #59):

Eva, a delightful 9-year-old from Sweden, is playing with some balloons near the office in the upstairs part of the school. She blows a few of them up without tying the ends and then releases them all at once. They go flying all over the place, which she finds very amusing. At one point, one of the balloons flies through the open door of a storage cabinet. There she finds a couple of old adding machines. She plays with them for a while, pushing the various buttons and noting what effect is produced on the machine’s tape. It is an old machine that makes a lot of noise as each entry is printed on the tape.

This gives her the idea of playing store. The adding machine is too cumbersome to move, so she just gathers together a few beer cases [SS: A staple of the school’s furniture] in the area outside the closet to make a chair and counter where she, the merchant, sits. She gathers a few articles to use as merchandise — some balloons, a book, a cup, some paper —which she stores inside the beer cases on her side of the counter.

She asks me, the customer, “What would you like?” I request a few things in my (at that point) very fragmented Danish (I had been in the country barely one week). She rings up the prices on her imaginary cash register (inspired by the adding machine just moments before) and announces the total bill. I pay her using pretend money, but she objects. I am unable to understand what I did wrong. After unsuccessfully trying to explain herself (Eva speaks no English) she writes the following down on a piece of paper: RETIGE PENGE. I knew the second word meant money, but did not know the first. I look it up in the dictionary, but it’s

not there. Invented spelling? Swedish? Who knows. In desperation Eva runs next door to the office to ask Annelise, the school’s secretary and accountant, how to say “RETIGE PENGE” in English. She comes back and says, “real money.”

Of course! I should have known. She wanted me to use real money (rigtige penge) instead of pretend money. Our game continues with me paying real money for the items. I learn that Eva can calculate and give change as fast as I (or even faster, since she is more familiar with Danish currency). The prices she charged in her store reflected a fairly good knowledge of real prices, or, when they didn’t, I would complain, which made the game all the more interesting. The game lasts quite a long time, and then Eva returns all the articles to their proper places, dismantles her beer case counter, and skips happily out the door to the downstairs part of the school, saying goodbye to me in English.

. . . It is not hard to see (though it would be nearly impossible to measure) the many different levels and facets of learning imbedded in such an episode, ranging from jet propulsion to calculation, to the social milieu of the boutique, to money, to foreign language, and, lest I forget, to making friends with an unfamiliar adult. All these facets were integrated into one whole — they were all of a piece. Whereas most people view fantasy as some sort of escape from reality, the way Eva (and many others like her) uses fantasy here is, if anything, to put her in closer touch with reality. Pretending to be a storekeeper is her way of understanding, through play-action, what it might be like to be in such a situation: to sell things to people, to count change, to argue and bargain about a price, to try to communicate with a foreigner, etc. Perhaps most important is the fact that, through this fantasy play, Eva is able to exercise her imagination. And because Eva is lucky enough to find herself in a place that affords her very, very much time for this sort of fantasy play, a place that does not oppose such play against “real schoolwork,” she has become extraordinarily good at it.

Becoming Gymnasts

From Fullis Conroy (PA):

Play has been and continues to be the essence of our lives. Meredith (8) and Fiona (5) become the gymnasts Nadia Comaneci and Olga Korbut, and these roles interchange, expand, and modify. They are exploring the world of gymnastics from their own perspectives. They have been influenced by the fact that Meredith has been on a team at a local gymnastics center since she was 6. Fiona started classes last fall.

They spend a great many hours each day doing warm-ups. Our living room has become a gym, with two tumbling mats and a carpeted floor beam. They hold competitions, but not necessarily against each other. They take turns at the roles of coach, judge, and performing gymnast, and use a tape of timed orchestrated music to compose floor routines of varied complexity, as well as a stopwatch to time each other. Judging is generous, from my point of view. They announce each other, acknowledge the judge, and give constructive feedback to each other on their performances.

The kitchen is often the dining room and social spot for the gymnasts. They pile the mats up and imagine they are in the dormitory Bela Karolyi’s elite gymnasts “bunk in.” It’s an endless game and they stay in character throughout the day. I’m never sure just who is at the lunch table.

They have immersed themselves in their fantasy, yet they are very much based in reality. We read lots of books about the sport and its stars. Each day brings a new awareness of what their bodies and talents can achieve. They are very serious about their play, but often fall into lovely peals of laughter and silliness too.

And by the way, homeschooling is another facet of their “gymnastics school.” They work beautifully together, writing, reading books, doing math, telling stories, organizing shows, playing monopoly, scrabble, and checkers, and so much more — all part of their “required studies.” Required by whom? Required and regulated by themselves.

Working Through Difficulties

From Peggy Webb (NY):

Watching Lena play has, over these five years, been fascinating, informative, sometimes puzzling and most always a delight for me. So many of her scenarios set off a chain of thought in me: “Why is she doing this? What is she learning from this?” It was easy to see the cause and effect when she was standing on a chair in front of the sink at eighteen months endlessly pouring water from one glass to another and then several months later expertly pouring her own breakfast juice.

I used the word scenario because that’s how many of her play games begin. Many times in a day she’ll walk in and say, “My name is Carrie and I’m 12 years old. Who are you?” This is my cue to be one of the several personas she has invented for me. I try to pick the one she seems to be after — my choices are: Little Peggy Who Is Only Fwee (three), which launches us into a sort of role reversal game and ends up with Carrie teaching Little Peggy the lower case alphabet or separating poisonous snakes from non-poisonous snakes; and Ruby, a friend that needs Lena’s help in a household task and likes to talk on the broken telephones we have all over the house.

Sometimes Lena wants me to be a sort of Ms. Conflict. She’ll say, “Will you be the mean person?” and I’m supposed to get some sort of fight going, make fun of her, poke her, etc. This is the part of her play that wears on me a little and about which I have questions. As an only child, Lena probably has disadvantages to surmount in attempting to understand behavior, so I indulge this persona she has created as often as I can, but I wonder sometimes because it seems to be the one she enjoys the most.

It’s hard to get the play back on track after these exchanges (much like a real fight) and maybe it’s because I hate doing it and don’t know if I should or where it’s taking her in her mind. I know she’s seen real brothers and sisters fight, heard people shouting at each other, and maybe she wants to explore this side of human behavior too, but it’s not something I like to encourage.

I’m also interested to know how many children spend as much time as

Lena seems to in another character. I’ve wondered and have even asked her when she goes into one of her “people,” “Why don’t you want to be Lena?” or “Let’s be Mom and Lena for now.” She’ll shake her head. Once in a while she’ll even say she doesn’t like being herself. This sets off all kinds of alarms in me when I hear it.

Sometimes Lena will sit for hours with one or another of her toy-filled milk cartons setting up elaborate games just so she can use a new favorite word. The last one I remember was the word “realize.” She must have loved that word when she first heard it. One night I was quilting and she had set up her cars, her block roads, her cardboard parking lot, her stuffed birds, her legos, her felt pieces and her plastic snakes under my frame and she was moving this or that piece around, talking the whole time. It took me a few minutes to REALIZE that in every sentence she was using the word realize. I could tell by the way it was rolling off her tongue that this was what the play was all about. A snatch of the monologue went like this: “And the green car realized he had nowhere to go so he broke through the fence and then the cardinal realized he was going to get crushed...”

Lena has already known two people who have died, one an 87-year-old woman and the other a 43-year-old woman who lived across the street. These events provoked a great deal of careful dialogue between us. Coincident to the younger woman’s death, Lena and I had begun collecting newspapers from the homes on our street to take to the recycling center in our area. We do this every week and Lena has a good understanding of why we do it and how it gets done. Several months after the death of our neighbor, Lena had a lego set-up on the living room floor: a building, some trees, and a sort of flatbed truck. She had two of her Barbie dolls and was wheeling them through the building and out the other side where the trees were, saying, “Watch out, don’t fall off,” and “Don’t be afraid, this’ll only take a minute.” I didn’t interrupt the play and was eventually rewarded with an explanation. The dolls were Helen and Dottie and they were being recycled into heaven.

Recently, while visiting my in-laws’ farm in Wisconsin, Lena and I were in a serious car accident. Our car was totaled and we came within inches of the same fate. I’m sure it’s the scariest thing that’s ever happened to Lena. What made it an even more difficult time was that I couldn’t give her the physical reassurance she must have needed because my collarbone was broken and I was utterly demoralized (the accident was my fault).

We are both on the mend and I mention it here only because so far this experience has not yet been given any play treatment. I’m sure it will, and it may already be starting. A week ago Lena asked me not to talk about the accident anymore, said it scared her, and also took to worrying about how we were going to replace the car. She was certainly vocalizing my inner feelings here. A few days ago she looked at her scabs under the microscope. Yesterday on a walk to the creek she became Carrie again and gave me a blow by blow account of the accident in a combination of her own words and those she’s heard others of us use. If I had to put money on it, I’d guess she’ll find a way to make sense of it or at least put it to rest sooner than I will.

Unusual Solutions

From Jan Hunt (BC):

All Jason (7) does is play, which is the same as saying that all he does is work. He has different kinds of play at different times of the day. In the morning, he plays in a play therapy, role-playing way. This has become part of our getting up routine.

This morning he played Burglar (the houses on either side of ours have been broken into recently). I was the burglar, a doll was the homeowner, and Jason was the policeman. He arrested me and put me in jail. At that point, though, the story took a wonderful, unique turn. Jason became the jailer. His first act as jailer was to bring me the blanket and pillow that I’d tried to steal earlier, and to say, “You must be very unhappy to steal these, so I’m giving them to you!” I then assured him that I was so pleased by that, I’d never steal again.

Much of his play is like this, working out not only his problems (such as worrying about whether our house might be robbed next), but the larger problems of our society in general. I like to think that all this practice in solving these problems in a compassionate and creative way will help him to find the unusual solutions which will be necessary in our society in the future.

Role-Playing

From Ellen Shipley (CA):

When does Billy (5) use fantasy to assimilate the real world? When doesn’t he? We live in a fantastic realm, the boundaries of which are in a constant state of flux. Each morning we discover who we are (it is rarely plain old Mommy, Daddy and Billy), and what we’re to do that day. I am Spotty Man to Billy’s Super Ted: Data to his Captain Jon-Luke Picard; Laura Ingalls to his Pa. He is usually the hero and I am the sidekick, but sometimes I am the villain, or we can suddenly switch.

The other day, he was Daddy and I was Billy, and we fell to discussing the recent events of the fast. “Remember when we went to the Renaissance Faire, Billy?” “Yes, I remember, Daddy.” “What did you like to do there, Billy?” And I had to dredge up everything he did, to a litany of, “And what else?” An interesting role reversal. Kids are asked to recite their exploits all the time, and it’s hard work!

But the game took an interesting turn when he said, “Remember when you messed with Mommy’s computer disks and she said you couldn’t play with PRINT SHOP because you were being punished?” “I remember, Daddy,” I said, feeling I should add, “I didn’t mean to do it.” I was surprised he even brought it up. As Daddy, he kept harping on the punishment, so when I finally said, “I’m sure Mommy will let me play with the computer again some day,” he was relieved, and his little wheels started clicking. “I think you can play PRINT SHOP now, Billy,” he said. “I don’t think so, Daddy,” I replied. “It’s up to Mommy.”

He seemed to accept that, and we went on to other topics. Then he tried a new tack: I was still Billy, but he was now Mommy, and he tried to lift the ban again. This cracked me up and I fell out of character (we’d been doing this game for over an hour, while we ran errands in the car), but when he realized it hadn’t worked, he switched back to being Daddy again. As Daddy, he had already conned me into playing his Atari with him when we got home, and he couldn’t be Mommy because Mommy doesn’t like to play computer games. (As Billy, of course, I had to play with him — he had me there!)

Another game we play on occasion is something I call “Said Billy.” The only way I can describe it is, it’s as if we are reading a script, but it’s all spontaneous. Billy may say something like, “‘Let’s go to the movies,’ said Billy.” “‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Mommy, glancing fondly at her son,” I may reply. “‘But we might like it,’ said Billy, looking up at Mommy and smiling.” And so on. Whatever we are doing at the time gets into the story. Usually we play this game while we’re grocery shopping. In fact, we play a lot of games like this while we’re out doing everyday tasks. It cuts down on the monotony and makes us laugh.

Billy uses make-believe to work things out that bother him, like scary scenes in movies. We once watched The Brave Little Toaster, a charming, animated movie about old appliances left behind in a summer house that go in search of their young master. It had all the aspects of a fairy-tale, including a frightening junkyard compactor that threatened them at the end of the movie. The movie ended happily, but not until it had provoked a frightened response. For days afterward, Billy played compactor games, smashing beloved toys or rescuing them in the nick of time. We even took turns being the compactor and the brave little toaster, until he had worked out his fears.

One fear, or uncertainty, that he had at Christmastime wouldn’t be put to rest until he had written a story about it. Christmas is very warm and traditional at our house, with cookies for Santa and stockings hung beside a crackling fire. But in spite of all our reassurances, Billy became obsessed with the fire in the fireplace. How would Santa get down the chimney? Would we forget to turn off the gas log? A few days before Christmas, Billy dictated a story called The Christmas fire, which began, “We put a fire in the fireplace on Christmas Eve. And then when Santa came, he found smoke coming up the chimney. And then he yelled down the chimney, ‘Stop that fire!’” After that, Billy seemed satisfied that Santa could handle it, even if we forgot.

When Billy has learned something new, like the Atari he got for his birthday, he often turns right around and teaches it to one of his imaginary playmates. I’ll hear him jabbering away to Pooh (not to be confused with another bear of that name), explaining and encouraging — and even correcting. Pooh is not a very cooperative bear, and he often ends up flying off in a huff to South America.

Billy’s latest game has him climbing the hill behind our house to do battle with trolls. He is Tacker, I am Princess, his father Bill is Night Pirate, and there is an entire troll family living in the culvert above our backyard. He climbs the steep incline, carrying his halberd, Excalibur (a handy piece of PVC pipe), with which he dispatches the luckless trolls. Then he casts their bodies down the hill, and we eat them for lunch. I can’t even begin to interpret that one!

Things are never dull around here, that’s for certain. Billy and his imagination keep us hopping.

A Child’s Laboratory

Kathleen McCurdy (WA) offered us these excerpts from her workshop, “Play — A Child’s Laboratory,” as her response to our request for thoughts on this topic:

Adults often take children’s play for granted. It seems to come so naturally. But play is active, rather than passive, and reflects emotional, physical and intellectual engagement with the world. Play helps children learn in a casual way many skills that would otherwise seem too complicated.

In our great eagerness to teach our children, we studiously look for educational toys with built-in lessons. Often these are less interesting than the child’s natural play. Play is by its very nature educational and fun.

Many of us are amused at the cute antics of puppies and kittens playing, but we also say, “It looks like fun, but they’re really also practicing survival skills —learning to catch things, to pounce.” Why is it that when we see children playing we don’t see them as practicing survival skills?

Perhaps some of you have read the work of Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees in Africa for years and years. She reported a striking example of how the chimpanzees’ early observation, together with play, led to skilled adult behavior. Adult chimps have learned to catch and eat termites by peeling the bark off little twigs, wetting them in their mouths, and then hooking them in the termite hole. The termites stick to the twigs, and the chimps pull them out. It turns out that this skill is handed down from older chimps to younger ones by means of play. The young chimps that Goodall observed didn’t go around fishing for termites — they were probably still on mother’s milk — but they spent time peeling bark off sticks and poking them in holes, finding out which sticks work best.

As children get older, they start playing in ways that we would normally call work. They play with a computer, or mess around with the car engine. So don’t worry — the kind of play that very young children do leads to this kind of play that we can see as leading to something you could do for a living. It transforms into what we call work. But wouldn’t it be neat if we called what we did play?

When our son Joe was about 3 or 4, he discovered scissors. At the time, we were doing quite a bit of traveling, so while we were in the car, he cut paper over and over again — first to see how many scraps he could produce, and later to make shapes. Finally he was done with scissors. Now scissors were a tool. He knew how to use them when he needed them.

Life Practice

From Mary Van Doren (ME):

We see that almost all our children’s fantasy play is “life practice.” They play babies, and having babies. They alternate having babies at home (where Greta was born) and at the hospital (where Helen was born).

For some reason we don’t understand, they play sharks and alligators. They run around on the bed, pick up the imaginary sharks, bring them to show us, and then put them back into the “water.” They show us baby sharks, mama sharks and papa sharks. (They see families in everything.)

An interesting thing started this winter. We were pretty isolated — no friends, no other children around, almost no contact with anyone outside the family. Helen began wanting to play restaurant often. She’d be a customer and Mark or I would serve her meals. Mostly, though, it seemed that we were being “someone new” for her to talk to. She’d tell us about her family and where they lived. It was as though she needed someone new to talk to sometimes, and pretended us right into strangers.

Both girls also play going shopping and going on a trip. They cram stuff into small suitcases, purses or whatever bags they can find and tell me, “I’m going on a trip now. Good bye.” Then they go into their toy car or walk out of the room. Soon they are back. Helen will say something like, “That was a long trip!” Occasionally I make a mistake and say, “Well, it’s nice to see you at home again!” Helen answers, “No! I’m at the store/at the far away place/not home now.” Their trips are usually to places we often go.

Mark plays scary games with them sometimes. I think the ideas come from him and not them, but they love to be a little bit scared. We know it’s time to stop when one of them says, “You’re not really a spider, you’re just Mark’s hand.” But up until then they play — guess what — tea parties with spider families.

“Birthday” is another major game around here. Both girls will go around the house wrapping presents, mostly to give to me, though they mostly always open them for me. They are really very ingenious when it comes to wrapping.

Sometimes it’s hard to see where fantasy stops and reality begins. Playing laundry in the bathtub often produces clean clothes, and playing wash the dishes gets the dishes clean.

Living in Dolltown

From Peter Bergson (PA):

Amanda (12), Emily (10), Julia (7) and Nicholas (4) have, for as long as I can remember, found ways of recreating their out-of-the-home experiences through fantasy play. Of their various milieu for such activities, none has been more consistent, more intensive, more challenging or more fun than the world of Dolltown.

Dolltown is now in a room on our third floor devoted totally to that one use. It began humbly enough eight years ago. I built a dollhouse with several rooms large enough to accommodate two seven-inch dolls which my wife had saved from her childhood and which Amanda had enjoyed dressing. It wasn’t long before I built another set of rooms for other, newer dolls.

At first Amanda and Emily had the dollhouses set up in their own bedrooms, but they found that they had the most fun when the dollhouses were set up side by side so they could play together. Because neither bedroom was large enough to handle all of the rooms and the stuff that came with the dolls, we emptied the spare bedroom that had been reserved for live guests, and Dolltown was born.

Since then, Dolltown has grown to include approximately fifteen buildings (four residences, a hotel, riding stables, a music store, stationery shop, post office, bank, general store, health food store, library, print shop, school (!), dress shop...); four extended families of dolls and assorted others (servants, shopkeepers, etc.) for a total population of about thirty. There’s also a box of “dead dolls” so that as each new storyline requires somebody new to come to town there’s always someone to call on to assume a new identity. There’s also a lake, made from an old porcelain dishpan, two wagons, a train, a baseball diamond, a theater. . . dare I go on. . . and, conservatively thinking, about 11,000 individual items, some purchased but most recycled and reinterpreted from the world outside.

One of our favorite examples of such reinterpretation is the time we were Christmas shopping in a mall and passed a display of brass-colored mailholders on sale. Amanda, then 5, exclaimed, “Oh, look, those would be great Dolltown brass beds!” and of course she was right, so for one fifth the price of “real” doll beds, we bought some. Over the years, literally hundreds and hundreds of items have similarly found new life in “D” (as the girls refer to it) as miniature replicas of real-life artifacts.

The children have added buildings over the years in response to their outside world experiences. We visited friends at their summer cottage on a lake in the mountains, came home, and shazaam, Dolltown got a lake and a beach, a dock, boats, life preservers, trees, swim suits, etc. We went to a high school production of Peter Pan and a few days later twenty dolls were all gussied up, seated in make-shift stands, watching a dolls’ production of Peter Pan, complete with costumes, scenery, flying actors (held up with wire, just like the live ones), tickets, a taped soundtrack, and intermission snacks. The girls have also recreated their violin and horseback riding lessons.

What struck me first about the Dolltown version of each activity was the precision with which the girls remembered, and then recreated, the most minute details of every experience. What I have grown to appreciate even more, however, is the depth of the personal interactions that are a part of the dolls’ experiences, and how these have been built into a very complex social system. Each permanent doll has a personality all its own, a history, tastes, skills, and preferences in work and play. Dolltown has its own legal system, property agreements, town council (with voting rules), monetary system, trash collection, transportation and postal system.

Familial lines and marital status are observed strictly, so that, for example, if one of the humans (as the dolls call the girls) decides that her doll family needs a baby, or someone to date/marry one of her single dolls, a trip to the “dead doll” box is required. I think the girls are as true to the history of their dolls as scriptwriters must be to the characters of an ongoing drama.

The community newspaper, The Dolltown Daily News, which for several weeks was published daily, features the town gossip as well as advice columns, news stories, and ads for D-town businesses. It’s delivered in time for breakfast to each doll building after being rolled and wrapped in plastic wrap (just as our Philadelphia Inquirer comes in a plastic bread bag), having been composed on our Macintosh computer and printed out in some pretty fancy type styles.

Practically everything that happens in our lives, then, shows up, in one fashion or another, sooner or later, in Dolltown. Listening to the children’s conversations as they play, both to each other and through their dolls, offers us a way to see how they take in, interpret, and come to understand the outside world.