Tragic Play

The week after I turned five, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. My family and I were living in the deep south at the time, in a very small town named Batesville, Arkansas. This was like a foreign land to our family, a bunch of Roman Catholic Yankees from the Northeast. My dad had recently taken a job as a chemist in little Batesville, just before the start of my older sister's start of the school year for 6th grade. I wasn't yet in school, but mostly hung out at home playing with the neighbor boy and my little beagle dog, Tippy.

The day JFK was shot, my sister came home in tears. They had announced that the president had been shot and killed over the loud speaker in her school, and to her horror, celebratory shouts of joy rose out among the classmates and teachers at the word that the president was dead. She came home lost and confused to find our parents weeping and glued to the television set.

I remember very little about that time except the endless TV images on our grainy black and white set. I can picture clearly the living room and the family huddled around the TV and feel the emotional climate of my big sister and parents, even today when I think back to that moment -- a time when they felt so utterly saddened by the loss of the president, but so isolated and so all alone in a place in which they did not feel they 'belonged.'

What does this have to do with play? Lots. In my young barely 5-year-old brain, at some point over those endless days of watching images of the funeral for our young president, seeing his children who were about my age -- John John a little younger, Caroline a little older -- really had an impact on me. This was probably the first time I'd been exposed to death and the deep emotions that it caused others. On one of the days following the president's funeral, I packed one of my dolls in a little pink doll chest, and the neighbor boy and I covered it with a cloth, and we paraded up and down the street playing funeral. As I recall, I received such ridicule from my big sister and reactions of 'horror' from my parents later that day or perhaps at dinner, that I quickly learned that there are some aspects of play that should be hidden away from 'big people.' I was probably laughed at or made to feel what I did was shameful instead of taking it as a time to talk to me about death and what I might be feeling.

I remember sitting on our little stoop outside our carport in subsequent days and smashing ants and other bugs with my tennis shoe to watch them die and turning around sheepishly to make sure that no one saw me. I remember feeling curious, guilty, shameful, and like a 'bad girl.' But I also knew by then it was something no one should know about and there was no one I could talk to about my questions about death!

Removing the Invisibility Cloak

In the past week or so I was asked to write a 1000 words about an article written a few years ago that had a influence on some of my own work -- the Visible Empathy of Infants. I was thinking about the different 'visibilities' or things that become visible to us when we are truly observant of the play around us. As I read Playing to Learn this week, the notions of visibility were swimming in my head as Smidt described the role of 'unpopular' play such as allowing dramatic play about the difficult issues children experience or worry about to be worked out in the play corner. Isn't it only through watching and listening that their worries and the depths of their concerns truly become visible to us? How better to know the children with whom we work? And, if we truly valuable individualizing the approaches that we take with each child, and fulfilling an obligation to meet their needs holistically -- not just academically, but in terms of social/emotional well-being as well -- isn't it necessary to allow these cloaks of invisibility to fall away in the relative safety of the environments we create for them?

Children see what we see, despite attempts to 'protect' them. They see the twin towers fall, they see drone strikes in far off lands, they see hurricane destruction, OR perhaps they actually live these things. Pretending they do not see or hear or witness our own emotional reactions is, well just silly.

Perhaps it is the burrying of these emotions and visions of horror and fear that have caused so many to have real-life trauma or difficulty dealing with problems, big and small, as they move into adulthood? If we do not help children learn to cope and deal effectively with their fears, to express them and to understand that they can talk to trusting and trustworthy adults, to have their questions and concerns treated honestly and respectfully, that they grow up with their own neuroses and fears, or more readily, perhaps, buy into the whole 'culture of fear' that some would have us live in?

Just musings for the day. I shared this quote with a couple of folks on their blogs, but it is one I heard on TV this week and I like it.

"Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons (monsters) exist. Children already know that (monsters) dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons (monsters) can be killed." G. K. Chesterton

Being -- Isn't that Enough?

I've been thinking a lot today about how I feel about something I read on the weekend that is a long held and widely supported notion about one of the main purposes of play with children -- as a rehearsal for life. It has always bothered me. Way, way, way back in graduate school, I remember being struck by an article by a group of scholars deeply passionate in their call to abolish the use of the word "preschool" and the reference of young children under the age of entry into the K-Primary grades as "preschoolers." It was their contention that these children were not "pre" anything, that to call them this discounted who they were. Children didn't just exist in this time of birth to age 5 or 6 in some period just waiting or even preparing to enter some grander, more significant time; they existed, they were here, and they were doing grand and significant things just by 'being.'

In more recent years, after I became involved with the European Early Childhood Early Childhood Research Association and started attending their conferences, I became very jazzed and excited by their slant on the human rights of the young child -- something little if ever spoken about or considered in the U.S. They speak openly about young children, birth to 5, as 'human beings, not just human becomings' and value their occupations -- work and play.

So it was in this context that I considered, or reconsidered as I read these old notions of play being a rehearsal for life. Why can't it be 'life'? It is the life that the young children are living and being and doing in those moments. It is who they are and what they are working on and enjoying in those moments. Oh sure, it may be formational, it may be shaping who they will 'become' as adults -- but so what? Everything I still do, think, experience now as a 54-year-old continues to shape who I am becoming as a 54-and-a-half-year old, as a future 60-year-old, who I'll be if I live to be a wise old grandmother, isn't it? Wouldn't it be condescending to say of what I do, think, experience, and of my work, play and activities, that I am "rehearsing for an older age"? It's nonsense. We're always learning and growing and changing as human beings AND as human becomings. So there!

And forgive me, Lara, but I'm stealing one of your beautiful photos. Two-year-old Isabella and her grandpa, David, are at very different stages in life, but they seem to be sharing a very similiar understanding of and feelings about the play they are engaging in, aren't they? Aren't they both growing and changing and learning at this time? They aren't 'rehearsing' for a dang thing. They are LIVING and BEING in the moment, a totally shared human moment that transcends ages and generations. This is what play means to me.

Oh, well. I have so much more to think about!