On Child’s Play

I love to watch my children when they are completely caught up in playing kindly and cooperatively together. Over the past two days (a weekend), I’ve had the pleasure of watching them play together on two afternoons. The first was sunny and in the 70s. The second was a cold rainy day that they had to spend indoors. To my great pleasure, their play was innovative and interesting. In both cases, they adapted characters from other works and played within certain narrative boundaries, but they also innovated and created new characters, settings, and storylines that went beyond the two media forms that they were using as their ur-texts.

In the case of their outside play, as I stained our deck and moved around landscape rock, I watched them come in and out of the house dressed in various fantastical costumes, with different sorts of props, and visiting all of the varied places in our yard that accommodate such play. I overheard them on several occasions and finally surmised that they were adapting and changing stories related to Winsor McCay’s seminal work of fantastical comic strip art from the early part of the last century, Little Nemo in Slumberland. My son was playing, Nemo, and my daughter was playing the Princess of Dreamland. On this occasion, my daughter seemed to be the chief instigator, making up the majority of the plot points for their play and my son innovated within the boundaries of the reality that she was creating. (She’s older, so this happens often. Also, in this case, her brother hadn’t read the original work, so she was spending time acquainting him with the world and conventions of Slumberland.) I recently got the collected works of McCay for my collection of graphic novels and introduced my daughter to it when she was home sick and I had to take her with me to the office for a few hours. She’s loved the work, and I was glad to see her sharing it with her brother.

The next day, we were forced to stay inside for most of the day, so they created several scenes related to the old TV series, Gilligan’s Island. We’ve been without television for about 4 months now, and we allow them to occasionally (especially when they are sick) watch DVDs. I had been given the first season for Christmas because I had mentioned something to my wife about watching it with the children. They liked it so much that I soon bought the second and third seasons. They’ve just about finished them all. Today, they played in a fantasy world based on Gilligan’s Island, but in which two other people (sea kayaker’s I believe) were cast away with the original seven. So in addition to Gilligan, the Skipper, the Howell’s, Ginger, the Professor, and Mary Anne, this version of Gilligan’s Island also has Nathaniel (a Gilligan type who is just a little smarter than Gilligan) and Summer (who seems to be an all around good girl, who is “an excellent chef.”) They created various parts of the island throughout the house with cushions and repositioned furniture.

To me, one of the most outstanding parts of this sort of play is the way that it co-opts so many different themes, scenarios, characters, and even props and costumes from so many other imaginative efforts. I can’t help but think that this sort of thing develops a different part of the mind than sports (which develops skills at organization, teamwork, and spatial and tactical thinking), or videogames (which develop problem solving skills and hand-eye coordination), or passive television watching (which, I don’t really know what good it does besides keeping the children out of my hair). I think that this kind of integrative play develops social understanding, an understanding of narrative, a sense of mythic play in storytelling, cooperation, and imaginative reaching. It is also quite fun to watch, especially when you yourself have been consigned by the fates to stain a deck and move rocks all day.