Tweet
Measured against most yardsticks, my 19-month-old baby doesn't really know very much. As I type this, for example, she is crouched in the kitchen, trying to start a conversation with the washing machine. Still, though - and trite as this sounds - every day, I learn a lot from her.I appreciate that I would say this, but I think I've received the greatest education from watching her play. This is an area that, for some reason, I assumed that I had all figured out before she arrived in my life, and it's an area that it turns out I had a near perfect misunderstanding of. Everything I thought about how kids play turns out to be wrong, if my daughter is anything to go by. It's been amazing to get a truer sense of the way things really work.
My long-held belief, and I have no idea where I picked this up, was that play was much simpler for kids - and in a way a little more honest. Kids played with whatever they had to hand, and they needed no internal architecture to get them going. Rules were for adults, who had to be tricked, or at least bribed, into having fun. As were rituals, achievements, levelling up, the works. Kids, meanwhile, would have a laugh with anything they found lying around. John Ruskin used to play with keys when he was a kid - normal, everyday house keys. Simpler times. (Also worth noting: he grew up to be quite an odd man. Ruskin childhood rearing? Not an unqualified success.)
Read more…
More...