THE WORK OF CHILDREN
Grownups have a tendency to remember the land of make-believe as a heavenly, sun-kissed bunny land. But the land of make-believe is less like heaven and more like hell. Children’s play is not escapist. It confronts the problems of the human condition head-on. As the teacher and writer Vivian Paley says of pretend play, “Whatever else is going on in this network of melodramas, the themes are vast and wondrous. Images of good and evil, birth and death, parent and child, move in and out of the real and the pretend. There is no small talk. The listener is submerged in philosophical position papers, a virtual recapitulation of life’s enigmas.”
Pretend play is deadly serious fun. Every day, children enter a world where they must confront dark forces, fleeing and fighting for their lives. I’ve written some of this book at my kitchen table, with the land of make-believe changing shape around me. One day as I sat at the table, my two daughters were making elaborate pretend preparations to run away from home. Earlier they had played dolls on the back deck and then had run screeching through the yard as sharks tried to eat them. (They managed to harpoon the sharks with sticks.) Later that same day, I took a break to play “lost forest children” with my younger daughter, Annabel. She set the scene: Pretend our parents are dead, she told me, “bited by tigers.” From now on we would live deep in a tiger-infested forest, fending for ourselves.
Children’s pretend play is clearly about many things: mommies and babies, monsters and heroes, spaceships and unicorns. And it is also about only one thing: trouble. Sometimes the trouble is routine, as when, playing “house,” the howling baby won’t take her bottle and the father can’t find his good watch. But often the trouble is existential. Here’s an unedited sequence of stories that preschoolers made up, on the spot, when a teacher asked, “Will you tell me a story?”
The monkeys, they went up sky. They fall down. Choo choo train in the sky. I fell down in the sky in the water. I got on my boat and my legs hurt. Daddy fall down from the sky. (Boy, three)
[Baby] Batman went away from his mommy. Mommy said, “Come back, come back.” He was lost and his mommy can’t find him. He ran like this to come home [she illustrates with arm movements]. He eat muffins and he sat on his mommy’s lap. And then him have a rest. He ran very hard away from his mommy like that. I finished. (Girl, three)
This is a story about a jungle. Once upon a time there was a jungle. There were lots of animals, but they weren’t very nice. A little girl came into the story. She was scared. Then a crocodile came in. The end. (Girl, five)
Once there was a little dog named Scooby and he got lost in the woods. He didn’t know what to do. Velma couldn’t find him. No one could find him. (Girl, five)
The boxing world. In the middle of the morning everybody gets up, puts on boxing gloves and fights. One of the guys gets socked in the face and he starts bleeding. A duck comes along and says, “give up.” (Boy, five)
What do the stories have in common? They are short and choppy. They are all plot. They are marked by a zany creativity: flying choo-choos and talking ducks. And they are bound together by a fat rope of trouble: a father and son plummet from the clouds; baby Batman can’t find his mother; a girl is menaced by a crocodile; a little dog wanders lost in the woods; a man is bludgeoned and bloodied.
A different collection of 360 stories told by preschoolers features the same kind of terrors: trains running over puppies and kittens; a naughty girl being sent to jail; a baby bunny playing with fire and burning down his house; a little boy slaughtering his whole family with a bow and arrows; a different boy knocking out people’s eyes with a cannon; a hunter shooting and eating three babies; children killing a witch by driving 189 knives into her belly. These stories amply support the play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith, who writes, “The typical actions in orally told stories by young children include being lost, being stolen, being bitten, dying, being stepped on, being angry, calling the police, running away or falling down. In their stories they portray a world of great flux, anarchy, and disaster.”
Themes of mortal trouble aren’t limited to the arguably artificial stories children invent for psychologists. Trouble also runs through transcripts of spontaneous play recorded in homes and daycares. Take this transcript of a preschool play session recorded by Vivian Paley. Three-year-old Marni is rocking an empty crib, humming to herself and looking at a doll’s arm that she can see beneath a pile of dress-up clothes.
Teacher: “Where’s the baby, Marni? That crib is very empty.”
Marni: “My baby went to someplace. Someone is crying.”
(Marni stops rocking the crib and looks around. There is a boy shoveling away at the sand table.)
Marni: “Lamar, did you see my baby?”
Lamar: “Yeah she’s in a dark forest. It’s dangerous in there. You better let me go. It’s down in this hole I’m making.”
Marni: “Are you the daddy? Bring me my baby, Lamar. Oh, good for you, you finded her.”
Teacher: “Was she in the dark forest?”
Marni: “Where was she, Lamar? Don’t tell me in a hole. No, not in a hole, not my baby.”
Or consider another play session, in which several children act out a spectacularly convoluted plot involving dynamite and princesses, bad guys and pilfered gold, endangered kitties and bold frog-ninja-dwarfs. The dialogue captures the almost-psychedelic creativity and exuberance of children’s play: it reads like a page out of Hunter S. Thompson.
“Pretend you’re a frog and you jump into a bad guy but you don’t know it.”
“Grab ’em!”
“He’s stealing kitty!”
“Get him, over there, get him!”
“Blast him, grind him up, he got the gold!”
“Meow, meow, meow.”
“Here’s your kitty, Snow White.”
“Are you the dwarfs? The frog dwarfs?”
“We’re the ninja dwarfs. The frog is a ninja. Watch out!
We might have to blow this place up again!”
BOYS AND GIRLS
Vivian Paley is a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner who has been writing about her experiences as a preschool and kindergarten teacher for decades. In her small masterpiece of kiddie anthropology, Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner, Paley describes a yearlong experiment in the psychology of gender. But Paley didn’t set out to run an experiment. Her main goal was just to make her class work better, and for that to happen, she needed the boys to behave. In Paley’s classroom, the boys were agents of chaos and entropy. They dominated the block corner, where they constructed battleships, starships, and other engines of war and then deployed them in loud, dire battles. The girls kept to the doll corner, where they decked themselves out in dress-up clothes, took care of their babies, chatted about their boyfriends, and usually managed to lure over a boy or two to play the roles of princes or fathers.
Paley was born in 1929. Her teaching career spanned massive changes in the fabric of American culture, not least of all in the standard gender roles of men and women. Yet over her career, pretend play hardly changed at all. As Paley’s career progressed from the 1950s through the 2000s, women moved into the workforce and men took on duties at home. But in Paley’s classroom, the calendar always seemed to be stuck at 1955. The children were precious little embodiments of gender stereotypes.
Paley—a loving teacher and a wonderfully sensitive observer of children—hated this. Her career was spent mainly at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where the values of the whole institution aligned squarely with Paley’s own liberal leanings. The parents of Paley’s students mainly avoided buying their daughters Barbie dolls for fear of encouraging unhealthy body images, and few allowed their boys to play with toy guns.
Paley watched in dismay as gender roles slowly hardened in her classroom. The girls were just so . . . girlie. They played dolls; they pined for their princes; they rarely ran or wrestled or shouted; they often told stories about bunnies and magical pink hippos
. And the boys were so . . . boyish. They sprinted and shouted and happily rioted; they shot the whole room full of imaginary bullet holes and scorched it with bombs. Denied toy guns, the boys fashioned them out of vaguely gun-shaped objects such as crayons, and when teachers confiscated those, the boys still had their fingers.
Worst of all, when the boys played pirates or robbers, they needed what all hard men need most: victims. And what better victims could there be than the girls? The boys were constantly slashing or blasting their way into the doll corner, dealing death and dragging away spoils. This would often drive the girls to tears—not so much because they disliked being shot or robbed, but because the boys were ruining their own fantasies. It is hard to play Cinderella when Darth Vader and his stormtroopers keep crashing the ball.
Paley’s book Boys and Girls is about the year she spent trying to get her pupils to behave in a more unisex way. And it is a chronicle of spectacular and amusing failure. None of Paley’s tricks or bribes or clever manipulations worked. For instance, she tried forcing the boys to play in the doll corner and the girls to play in the block corner. The boys proceeded to turn the doll corner into the cockpit of a starship, and the girls built a house out of blocks and resumed their domestic fantasies.
Paley’s experiment culminated in her declaration of surrender to the deep structures of gender. She decided to let the girls be girls. She admits, with real self-reproach, that this wasn’t that hard for her: Paley always approved more of the girls’ relatively calm and prosocial play. It was harder to let the boys be boys, but she did. “Let the boys be robbers,” Paley concluded, “or tough guys in space. It is the natural, universal, and essential play of little boys.”
I’ve been arguing that children’s pretend play is relentlessly focused on trouble. And it is. But as Melvin Konner demonstrates in his monumental book The Evolution of Childhood, there are reliable sex differences in how boys and girls play that have been found around the world. Dozens of studies across five decades and a multitude of cultures have found essentially what Paley found in her midwestern classroom: boys and girls spontaneously segregate themselves by sex; boys engage in much more rough-and-tumble play; fantasy play is more frequent in girls, more sophisticated, and more focused on pretend parenting; boys are generally more aggressive and less nurturing than girls, with the differences being present and measurable by the seventeenth month of life. The psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer sum up this research: “Most of the time we see clear-cut differences in the way children play. Generally, boys are more vigorous in their activities, choosing games of adventure, daring, and conflict, while girls tend to choose games that foster nurturance and affiliation.”
The Neverland boys inhabit is very dangerous; the threat of death and destruction is everywhere. Boys’ time in Neverland consists largely of fighting that threat or fleeing from it. The Neverland of girls is dangerous, too, but not quite so crowded with hobgoblins and ax murderers, and not as focused on exuberant physical play. The sorts of dilemmas girls face are often less extreme, with a focus on workaday domestic crises.
But it is important to stress that girl play only seems untroubled when compared to the mayhem of boy play. Risk and darkness seep into the doll corner as well. For example, Paley recounts how, at first glance, it may seem that the girls are sweetly playing mother and baby. But look closer. First, the baby almost gets fed poison apple juice. Then a bad guy tries to steal the baby. Then the baby “gets his bones broken off” and is almost set on fire.
The role of sex hormones in gender generally, and play behavior specifically, is illuminated by a disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which results in females being exposed to abnormally high levels of male sex hormones in utero. Girls with CAH are quite normal in most respects, but “affected girls show more boy-typical play, prefer playing with boys more, and are less interested in marriage, motherhood, doll play and infant care.” Girls with CAH enjoy rough-and-tumble as much as boys do, and they prefer “boy” toys such as trucks and guns over “girl” toys such as dolls and dress-up clothes.
Similarly, Paley recounts an incident where two girls playing Rainbow Brite and her flying pony, Starlite (magical characters from a 1980s animated television series), are having dinner together. Everything is going fine until a bad guy named Lurky appears. The cute little characters, played by two cute little girls, have no choice but to kill Lurky with explosives.
Unlike some of the other subjects of this book—fiction or dreams—almost no one thinks that children’s pretend play is some sort of random accident of human evolution. The pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget, who thought that the fantasy life of children was “a muddle out of which more adequate and orderly ways of thinking will emerge,” is now definitely in the minority. These days, experts in child psychology agree that pretend play is for something. It has biological functions. Play is widespread in animals, and all but universal in mammals, especially the smart ones. The most common view of play across species is that it helps youngsters rehearse for adult life. From this perspective, children at play are training their bodies and brains for the challenges of adulthood—they are building social and emotional intelligence. Play is important. Play is the work of children.
Sex differences in children’s play reflect the fact that biological evolution is slow, while cultural evolution is fast. Evolution hasn’t caught up with the rapid changes in men’s and women’s lives that have occurred mainly in the past one hundred years. Children’s play still seems to be preparing girls for lives beside the hearth and preparing boys for lives of action in the world. This is the basic division of labor—men doing the hunting and fighting and women doing most of the foraging and parenting—that has characterized human life over tens of thousands of years. Anthropologists have never found a culture where, say, women do the lion’s share of fighting or men do most of the child care.
Writing this, I feel a little like the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Before tying a noose and hanging the titular feline from a tree, the narrator first digs out the cat’s eye with a jackknife. Confessing his crime, he writes, “I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity!” The idea that gender has deep biological roots is something almost everyone accepts these days but still avoids saying in polite company. It sounds too much like a limit on human potential, especially on the potential of women to move into positions of cultural equality. But the spectacular changes in women’s lives over the past half century—driven largely by the way that cheap and reliable contraception has given women control of their fertility—should allay our fears.
When my daughter Annabel announces her plan to become a princess when she grows up, I squirm. I say, “You know you can be other things, like a doctor.” And Annabel replies, “I’ll be a princess and a doctor. And a mommy.” And I smile and say, “Okay.”
AND DOWN WILL COME BABY
Where do the blood and tears of children’s play come from? It’s possible that they come partly from the stories we tell them. In the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales, for example, children are menaced by cannibal witches, wolves bolt down personified pigs, mean giants and innocent children meet grisly deaths, Cinderella is orphaned, and the ugly stepsisters slash off chunks of their feet in hopes of cramming them into the tiny glass slipper (and this is before getting their eyes pecked out by birds). And then there’s a tale called “How the Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” which was published in the first edition of the Grimms’ tales. Here is the story entire:
A man once slaughtered a pig while his children were looking on. When they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other: “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher,” whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into his brother’s neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child’s neck a
nd, in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who had been the butcher. She then rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub, but in the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields and saw this, he was so distraught that he died shortly thereafter.
Image from “The Old Witch,” an English fairy tale.
The standard nursery rhymes are about as bad: babies fall out of trees “cradle and all,” a little boy mutilates a dog, an old woman who lives in a shoe cruelly whips her starving children, blind mice are hacked up with carving knives, Cock Robin is murdered, and Jack smashes his skull. In one collection of familiar nursery rhymes, a critic counted eight murders, two choking deaths, one decapitation, seven cases of severed limbs, four cases of broken bones, and more. And in a different study, researchers found that contemporary children’s television programs had about five violent scenes per hour, while read-aloud nursery rhymes had fifty-two.
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Page 4
