Mini-Golf, Go-Carts, Carnival Games, And Junk Food

Recently, I found myself in the neighborhood of one of those plastic fantastic fun palaces. There was a mini-golf course complete with the classic windmills and castles, a go-cart track, and a warehouse full of carnival games that issue tickets that one can trade in for crappy prizes. It struck me as a bit depressing, run down and seedy, but based on the high pitched excitement going on around me, the kids disagreed.

This is a place designed to excite children: colorful, fast-paced, and with the promise of hands-on access to long metal sticks that are are to be swung, hard, colorful balls that are to be sent flying, petal-to-the-metal driving, and straight up gambling with someone else's money, not to mention cotton candy, popcorn, hotdogs, and the full gambit of forbidden foods. It's a place where yelling, shrieking, laughing, and singing at the top of your lungs is not just permitted, but encouraged, as are running, jumping, and swinging from railings.

I stood watching the go-cart races for a time, or rather, the faces of the giddy, wide-eyed drivers as they zoomed past.

These were the faces of children who had been told "Yes."

It's not like children in particular like mini-golf, go-carts, carnival games, and junk food. I mean, those are fun activities and all, but I think those expressions have far more to do with the fact that these things exist in what is explicitly a "Yes space." I've see that same wide-eyed giddiness on children playing at Woodland Park's junkyard playground. It's the expression children wear when church services are finally released and they get to run around on the lawn. It's there when children attend a bouncy-house birthday party or hike in the woods or play at a beach. 

It's not the mini-golf, go-carts, carnival games, and junk food: it's the result of adults being distracted enough by their own pleasure to stop peppering them with "No." 

What children need and love is freedom, and there is far too little of that in our children's lives. It's not difficult to connect mini-golf, go-carts, carnival games, and junk food to adult futures in which freedom is packaged up in vacations, fast cars, gambling, and binging on brownies and booze. We all love freedom, and there is far too little of it in any of our lives. We take it where we can find it, even if that so-called freedom is sold to us as a packaged commodity. 

And where we find freedom where we hear "yes." In a world of "no" we need more "yes." It shouldn't be reserved for mini-golf, go-carts, carnival games, and junk food.

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"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices.

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