"I give you this toy to bond you to me, now go away and play with it by yourself."
Said the play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith.
November 24, 2022
"The history of toys is the history of teaching children to preoccupy themselves usefully and solitarily."
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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
"I give you this toy to bond you to me, now go away and play with it by yourself."
Said the play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith.
If I had just read those two lines, with no context, I might have thought it was an excerpt from a short story by Saki. The snarkish sound of the quotation and the man's name would fit in well there.
The play theorist (how on earth is that a thing?) should go back and rethink his theory. Hey theorist! Leave this kids alone!
I couldn't get past the first line: "the week my eldest son finished nursery..." Who talks like that? Elders don't finish nursery; kids do.
The author says "my eldest son", which indicates at least two younger siblings, yet he speaks as if his son is an only child. Why clear out the toys if you have more children?
I won't read the whole article, but the best life lesson a parent can give is to have more than two children. All of the toys in the world are incidental.
Wow, that is not the reason I give my kids toys. People need to have more than one or two kids. Apparently, you'll stop treating children as a problem to solve.
My grandson and I built a Candy rocket last weekend and launched it over 1,000-feet into the air. Stump remover powdered sugar kitty litter PVC long dowels slow. fuse We like building our own toys. Bow and arrows out of pve, insulation duct tape long dowels zip ties etc. Model airplanes out of foam board tape and kabob sticks. Bopper swords and knives out of PVC pool noodles and duct tape.
Kids are great. And they are like sponges, able to absorb whatever you put in front of them. But they are kids. If they cannot have fun when they're kids, when do you think that chance will come? Kids are great. Don't fuck them up.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
"Play theorist" is ambiguous.
Is he theorizing about play or playing at theorizing?
Human children play with toys for the same reasons that all animals do, for enjoyment and to develop fine motor skills. Legos may hurt like Hell when stepped on, but they're the perfect toy.
Temujin said...
"Kids are great. And they are like sponges, able to absorb whatever you put in front of them. But they are kids. If they cannot have fun when they're kids, when do you think that chance will come? Kids are great. Don't fuck them up."
They are seriously interested in what adults do. When my daughters were little they would help me on projects. Of course you have to slow things down and simplify them, but it's very important to them that they contribute.
Temujin said...
"Kids are great. And they are like sponges, able to absorb whatever you put in front of them. But they are kids. If they cannot have fun when they're kids, when do you think that chance will come? Kids are great. Don't fuck them up."
They are seriously interested in what adults do. When my daughters were little they would help me on projects. Of course you have to slow things down and simplify them, but it's very important to them that they contribute.
Ann Althouse said...
"Play theorist" is ambiguous.
"Is he theorizing about play or playing at theorizing?"
That's not important, Ann. It's the grant money that's important.
The history of children is that with the exceptions of the wealthy (a definition that has greatly expanded the last 200 years), children have always gone to work as soon as they are physically able. Prior to FDR, children dressed as adults, had adult responsibilities and were largely expected to behave like adults as young as five years old.
To be fair to the Chinese, child labor is not an outrageous new phenomenon, it is the default state of humanity. Every industrialized nation behaved exactly the same way during their transition from agriculture to industry.
ALL toys are learning tools.
That said, I ran a preschool for most of a decade and we didn't allow anything with a screen, because - as I told prospective families - our location (in the country, surrounded by middle-class-and-up developments) meant that no child in our school did not have access to a computer at home. So our toys - and we were a play-based school - were hands-on and developmentally appropriate.
"For decades we’ve been using toys to cram learning into playtime"
There's that we again. Althouse needs a we tag.
Hypothesis: we-generalizations in the MSM serve to express prog sentiment and/or browbeat non-progs.
It's hard to think of a toy which isn't a scaled-down version of an implement adults use. Or work with or on. A doll is a baby and kids use it as such; not as a target for a water pistol, which is a gun.
Full disclosure. Not a parent. But…studies have shown kids are very, very creative - at least up to a certain age. My attitude on toys is to not worry about development. Let the kid play. If a kid is engaged and playing, learning is happening. Stop transferring your tight-ass ambitions to little kids.
I had a boss whose wife fired their nanny whom she “felt” wasn’t playing with their baby productively enough.
When my son was 10 I made him a potato cannon. Those are legal in Texas only if intended for use as noisemakers. Why he kept going out in the woods with Aquanet hair spray, a bag of potatoes, and his friends (with their own cannons) is beyond me.
So I thought, and so did my parents.
The point though, seems to be to use the toys to get children to engage with other children.
"Play theorist" is ambiguous.
Is he theorizing about play or playing at theorizing?
Stay in the business long enough and you realize they are all playing at theorizing.
My children could smell an “educational” toy a mile away.
I loved the educational toys. Map puzzles, anything from Edmund Scientific or Radio Shack…but I was a bit precocious…
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