"That's Not True!"

"Let's play Tiger Babies."

"I want to be a polar bear baby."

"You can't because tiger babies would eat polar bear babies."

"That's not true! Polar bear babies eat tiger babies!"

"That's not true!"

I stepped closer because it was the sort of argument that could escalate, which is always the case when "truth" is at stake. And truth is always at stake when children are engaged in dramatic play.

Of course, by definition, dramatic play, like all fiction, is about the imagination, a place where "truth" is, at best, subjective. Indeed, the children were engaged in a counterfactual game, one in which they were asserting something that is objectively not true: that they, human children, were in fact animal babies. In that context, it seems absurd to be arguing over truth, and adults often respond that way when they feel compelled to intervene, yet games like this are not only crucial for children seeking to understand their world, but also one of the things that makes humans human.

As far as we can tell, we are the only species that regularly engages in counterfactual thinking, a term used in psychology to describe the phenomenon of imagining the world in ways contrary or different from the way that it is. It is both the bane and the glory of our species in many ways. On the one hand we are cursed with the ability to imagine an impossibly perfect world which too often serves to make it even more difficult to make peace with the real one. On the other hand, counterfactual thinking is always the first step in changing the world from what it is to what it could be.

Indeed, the entire world of today is counterfactual from the perspective of a Stone Age human. The modern world is a product of counterfactual thinking, as will be any future that includes humans in it.

There are a whole host of things children are learning as they engage in counterfactual play. It gives them the opportunity to work on understanding what goes on in other people's minds, it is a safe place in which to engage in higher order thinking, it lays the foundation for literacy, it requires the social necessities of negotiation and compromise and agreement. It's easy to dismiss children's dramatic play as silly, as a waste of time even, especially when we hear them intensely arguing over "truth," but what they are doing is exercising their imagination and creativity. They are, quite simply, learning the skills that will make tomorrow.

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Teaching Mindfulness

I was recently asked in a public forum if I've ever taught mindfulness to children. The question threw me. Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, can you repeat the question? 

Mindfulness is a radical Buddhist practice in which one focuses one's full attention on the present moment. This is something toward which I strive, even as I find it exceedingly difficult to achieve for any more than a few minutes at a time. Yesterday, ironically, I was reading a novel in which one of the characters said something about mindfulness that sparked a train of thought that took my brain so far away from the present moment that I had to re-read several paragraphs. I find it a slippery thing to accomplish, requiring discipline, concentration, and practice. A quiet mind is a healthy thing, something valued by medical and spiritual practices from east to west.

Mindfulness as a concept has broken through into our popular culture, really taking off as a popular phenomenon in recent years. There are more than 100,000 books being sold on Amazon with some version of the word in the title, not to mention the proliferation of mindfulness workshops and seminars and gurus. My social media feeds are full of mindfulness memes.

As I reflected on being stumped by the mindfulness question, I had to admit that I've never attempted to teach children the practice of mindfulness. Yet I've spent my professional career surrounded by it. I see it being practiced wherever there are young children engaged in self-selected activities. A child bent over a puzzle in the midst of a noisy classroom is not just working a puzzle, she is the puzzle. Children negotiating their way through their games of princesses and super heroes are fully there in the moment, intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. And the younger the children are, the more mindful they tend to be: a baby staring off into the middle distance is, in that moment, the entire universe.

Every day, if I can manage to be mindful enough to see it, I am inspired by the children's ability to be mindful. How can I pretend to teach mindfulness to the experts? We are born mindful. The challenge, is to not lose it as we grow up and it seems that the best place to start is to not unlearn it in the first place. As important adults in children's lives, we too often allow our agendas, our drive to move from here to there, our unquiet minds, to override the mindfulness of children. We insert ourselves, uninvited, into their play with our ideas and concerns and scaffolding and witticisms, drawing their attention away from the present moment, often in a jarring manner. We can't teach mindfulness to the experts, but we can leave them to it. And maybe if we can manage to allow them the time and space for it, they won't grow to forget this wisdom with which they were born.

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Considering The World As Others See It

The modern novel as an art form gained a toe-hold the early 1700's, with novels like Robinson Crusoe reaching a mass audience. They advanced gradually as a source of entertainment through that century as works like Pamela and Tom Jones became popular. But the novel really found its stride when writers like Jane Austen picked up their pens in the early decades of the 19th century, reaching a climax in the Victorian era with authors like Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the Bronte sisters, not to mention Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and Balzac, Hawthorne and Melville. Looking back, one can hardly imagine a greater artistic flowering, yet the novel was widely regarded as a "rot." Not the necessarily the works of the authors I've mentioned, which were begrudgingly considered to have merit, but novels in general, the kinds the masses were consuming, especially young women. They were condemned as, at best, a waste of time, and at worst the gateway to mental illness. Well-intended parents were known to forbid their daughter novels while the girls predictably sought to hide their "dirty" habit.

Most parents today would be thrilled if their children were "addicted" to novels. We can think of few things more wholesome and educational. In contrast to our Victorian counterparts, we even lecture our children on the importance of reading books, any books, indeed anything, except, of course, the reading they really want to do, which is the rot found on the internet.

Scientists now tell us that we're right and the Victorians were wrong. Reading novels is good for us. Novel reading is an important socializing influence in that fiction readers have been found to be better able to understand and empathize with their fellow humans. Although we're wrong in the sense that all reading is not equal, at least when it comes to acquiring these social and emotional benefits: those who read genre fiction or non-fiction showed no improved capabilities in this area. It must be literacy fiction, which tends to focus more on the psychology of it's characters, rather than just exciting plots or the conveyance of facts and opinions (not to suggest that these sorts of reading are not valuable in other ways).

Preschool aged children, of course, do not read novels, but their dramatic play serves the same function as reading literary fiction does for adults. As they try on new costumes, they are trying on new personas, which helps them explore and better understand other people's minds, one of the most important skills we can have as social animals. Fiction, theater, or dramatic play allows us to consider the world as others see it, to put ourselves in shoes that are not our own. It's one of the ways we come to understand one another and is an avenue toward considering how the world could be different, which is always the first step in changing it. And ultimately, it's only through a better understanding others that we come to better understand ourselves.

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"We Protect People"

There were always kids in Woodland Park's 4-5's classes who spent large portions of their days together playing "super heroes." They might call it something different, like good guys, bad guys, Star Wars, or Ninjas, but the essentials of the game remained the same: they formed a team, negotiated their roles, discussed in detail just how powerful they were, then race about talking tough, making fierce faces, and striking assertive poses.

And just as predictably, there were always some children who came to fear the super heroes.

It's tempting for adults to simply impose restrictions on the super hero play in defense of the children who are afraid, but I think that misses an opportunity for the children to learn about what it means to be members of a community. And it begins with the all-hands-on-deck class meetings that we call circle time.

One year, several children had expressed their fears, both directly to me and through their parents, so when the children assembled for circle time, I wanted to steer the conversation that way. We started off talking about our classroom rules, the agreements the children have made with one another. I was prepared to broach the subject of super heroes myself, but was hoping that it would emerge from the kids. I knew that one girl, H, via her mother, had been attempting to summon up the courage to suggest an outright ban on the super hero play, and this was the day.

I said, "H has something to say," and she replied, "No super hero play."

There was a moment of dead silence as her words sank in. Then the super heroes, their expressions full of shock and outrage, raised a chorus of, "Nooooo," which was followed by a more scattered chorus of, "Yesssss." It was obvious that we were not going to reach consensus on this rule, but that wasn't the point: the point was to have the discussion. Once we'd settled down we took turns making our cases, starting with those who were feeling afraid. Several classmates joined H. As they spoke up I watched the superheroes who were paying attention the way one does when the topic is of utmost importance. As they listened to their classmates say that the super heroes frightened them, their expressions turned from outrage to what I can only describe as dismay.

When it was the super heroes' turn to talk, one of them said, emotion rising in his throat, "But we're good guys." Another said, "We protect people." They were simply astonished that they had been so misunderstood. They were genuinely shocked that anyone to be afraid of them.

The discussion that followed was long and rambling. We knew we couldn't all agree to H's suggested rule, but we talked about things we could do like being more aware of one another's feelings, being more direct with one another about how we were feeling, and figuring out better ways to share the space and resources. We learned in that discussion that most of the children were neutral about the super heroes, sometimes joining them, but not every day. They had concrete suggestions, but perhaps their most important contribution was to let their friends know that they weren't afraid, which I think helped some of the more fearful children see that there was an alternative to either-or. I didn't check the clock, but it was a long, productive discussion in which the kids learned something about one another: about who we were as a community.

This wouldn't be the last time we needed to talk about this, but it was a good starting point and the parents of the anti-super heroes reported that their children came away feeling much better, empowered even. As for the super heroes, they had been sincere in their desire to not frighten their classmates going forward, even if they sometimes forgot as they immerse themselves in their dramatic play. And we adults now had a concrete reference point for supporting the children as they worked this through.

A few days after our classroom discussion, one of super heroes was running full speed near the swings. A boy standing nearby flinched as he passed, which caught our caped crusader's eye. He slowed briefly and said, "I'm sorry I scared you," and his friend replied, "That's okay. I was only scared for a second." Like I said, we're going to be working on this for the rest of the school year, but man that was awesome.

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How To Change The Games Children Play

In the days following the horrors of 9/11, several of the children at our daughter's preschool began to fly toy airplanes into block towers, over and over. They were clearly, through their play, processing the events. Every day, children are doing this as they play, preparing themselves in one way or another for the world they perceive awaits them. Hunter-gatherer children tended to play games of hunting and gathering. Contemporary children play games of housekeeping or driving cars or shopping.

Sometimes the "purpose" of their play is obvious to us, even if it isn't conscious on their part. The girl who plays hospital games in the weeks after her own visit to the emergency room obviously isn't telling herself that she needs to "process," but she is driven to it nevertheless, and it shows up in her freely chosen activities. Perhaps more often, however, the child's "purpose" isn't as evident, leaving thoughtful adults to ponder since the children themselves cannot tell us. If you ask a child who is, for instance, playing superhero, why he is drawn that particular game, he's likely to respond, "Because it's fun!" which is likely true even if it's not the whole story. Most of us would agree that there is something about being powerful or masculine or protecting others at the bottom of this type of play.

Some argue that a child playing superhero is just imitating something he's seen on TV and that if we took away his access to the boob tube he would stop playing the game. Maybe, but that doesn't explain why even the children I've taught who don't have television often play similar types of power games, even if they call themselves something else, like "bad guys" or "firefighters." No, the fact that this type of play comes up year-after-year, mostly among boys, tells me that they are not merely aping media messages, but are rather seeking to understand or practice something deeper that they don't just want, but need to understand, or for which they must practice. I would make the same assertion about girls, and it's mostly girls, who play princess games: we might personally reject the cult of feminine beauty, but the ubiquity of this sort of play across the years tells us that it is something that is "important" to process or practice or understand.

When we see "violent" games, when we see games based on superficial beauty, it's tempting for some of us to try to put a lid on it, or to steer children away from it, or to somehow create environments in which this sort of play doesn't emerge. As a young parent, I misguidedly and half unconsciously attempted to raise our daughter as a "tomboy," dressing her in overalls, buying her Hot Wheels, taking her to sporting events. I'll never forget the day as a two-year-old when she came across a heavily bejeweled princess crown at a friend's house, popped it on her head, looked me in the eye, and said, "You don't know what girls do," then proceeded to wear a crown, daily, for the next three years.

I see the same phenomenon happening these days with technology and smart phones in particular. Almost every school in America has instituted limitations on their use. The nation of France has recently outright banned children under 15 from using their phones at school "amid fears that students were becoming too dependent on and distracted by their smartphones." I have no doubt if given the choice, most school-aged children would chose their phones over the adult-directed curriculum from which they are being "distracted." What's happening on their phones is, from their perspective, much more important. And as to becoming dependent? Look around. The whole world is becoming dependent. The kids are just trying to process, understand or practice for the future, just as those kids flying toy airplanes into block towers were trying to make sense of the real world events that had come into their lives.

I'm not arguing that we should allow children access to new technology willy-nilly or that there is nothing we can do about violent games or beauty games. What I am saying is that children will always show us the future, as they perceive it, through their play. And children are incredibly adept at seeing through our envision-a-better-world smokescreens to zero in on what skills, habits, and knowledge they will need to live in the real world, and then to set out to understand or practice or process it, often to our chagrin. In one sense, when children play, they are holding up a mirror. If we don't like what we see, it's on us to make changes, both personally and societally. We will know if we've succeeded only when the children change the games they play.

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Making Light From Darkness

During the better part of the 19th century and well into the 20th, the scientific consensus was that we would one day figure it all out. The universe was but a clockwork and given enough time, humans would come to understand it. Today, however, we know enough to know that we will never know everything. We can only know what we can perceive, what our senses can take in, what our brains can interpret, but we are very limited in our abilities, adapted to a certain niche, one that causes us to, for instance, see time as something that flows from past to present, even as we now know that this "understanding" is merely an accident of our unique perspective and the limitations of our senses.

At it's core, life will always be a mystery. Art is the human response to the unknowable: it is how we teach ourselves to live with the mystery.

This explains why humans are driven to engage in art. Since the dawn of humankind, we have made music, danced, told stories, and created physical representations of life as we experience it, both externally and internally. Many of us still place "science" on a pedestal, pushing art aside as a kind of amusement. Increasingly, our schools have done this, replacing the arts with "instructional time," in order to focus almost exclusively on literacy and mathematics, the hammer and sickle of science, tools that are seen as necessary to engage in a clockwork world, a world that we now know doesn't exist. Those of us who work with young children have found ourselves in the sad position of having to defend our work, to defend childhood play, to defend our commitment to filling our charges' world with opportunities to dance, sing, pretend, and paint, to engage with the mystery that will always lie at the heart of life.

As I watch children play, I certainly see them engaged in the foundational scientific process of trial and error. What happens when I do this? I wonder if I can make that happen again. They are scientists for sure, but they are at least in equal measure artists, acknowledging from the start the limits of their own perceptions and learning to live with that by saying to one another, "Let's pretend . . ." When they aren't experimenting, they are making art with whatever comes to hand, arranging stones in a circle or leaves into patterns. Sometimes they paint what they see; sometimes they paint what they feel. They dance even when there isn't music, kicking up their legs, leaping, skipping, and twirling as they perform even the mundane act of moving from here to there. When they sing at the tops of their lungs, when they make rhythms by beating on buckets, they are teaching themselves how to live with the mystery.

Art stands at the center of the human experience: it is how we make light from darkness.

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Baby Games

A child psychologist friend once told me that he kept a doll house in his office, explaining that he could often learn more about a child while playing "family" with her than in any number of hours of traditional talk therapy. I'm no therapist, but I can certainly see the potential there.

"I'm this baby."

"I'm the mommy bunny."

"I'm a baby too."

"But I'm the littler baby."

"I want to be the littlest baby."

Just in how they choose their roles, there's a whole world of aspiration and query. Over the years I've noted that more children want to play the "baby" role, the younger and more helpless the better. For a long time, I assumed that "mommy" was the power role, the one that went to the child with the strongest urge to be in control, but I know now, as every child knows who has ever lost her place in the family to a younger sibling, it's the baby who really wields the power. Their helplessness demands attention and that's what the babies do in these games.

A group of our four and five year olds had been playing "baby" games for most of the year, typically assuming the roles of baby tigers or baby polar bears or other types of baby animals. There were no mommies in these games, but rather owners who were forever wrestling those naughty babies back into their beds or cages or caves or homes in order to "keep them safe." I'm sure my child psychologist friend would have a field day with these games filled with misbehavior and compulsion, these games where the baby, no matter how it behaved, continued to be cared for and loved. But as a teacher, I don't need to know what it means: I simply need to understand that the children are engaged in experiments they have designed to answer their unique social-emotional questions.

There have been times when I would drop to my knees in the midst of these games and assume the role of "middle" or "oldest" child, the roles that appeared to me to have the least power, then attempt to role model how one can assume power (or satisfaction or control or whatever) from this role. Or maybe I would take on another role, hoping to somehow "teach" a lesson through my behavior within the game. They were misguided efforts at best: I had taken over their game to answer questions they weren't asking, skewing their data, scuttling their journey, making it about my adult attempts a social-emotional engineering rather than their own purposeful and meaningful exploration of the real world as they experienced it.

Today, as children play house, I simply listen, even when they say things that make me cringe, even when the mommies boss the babies or the babies behave like mini-tyrants, even when I notice that no one wants to be the middle or oldest child. It's not my job to know what it means, that's for them (and perhaps a future therapist) to know. Mine is to create the space, to step back, and to wonder.

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Playing Their Way To A State-Of-The-Art STEM Education

(Note: I hate that I need to write this post, just as I hated writing my post about how children learn to read through play. Play is a pure good and should not need to be defended, but I also know we live in a real world where  policy-makers still consider play a mere relief from serious work rather than a core aspect of the real work of being human. I hope, at least, that those of you who do need to defend play will find this useful.)

My wife is the CEO of a software company. Earlier in her career she was an automotive executive and has held senior positions in several technology-based businesses. She is, as she realized to her delight not long ago, one of those much sought for rarities: a woman with a successful STEM career. That said, she studied languages at university. That's right, languages, not science, technology, engineering or math, yet here she is today running a technology company.

One-to-one correspondence

Science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM as they are collectively called in the contemporary lexicon, has become an emphasis for our schools both public and private. The idea is that those legendary "jobs of tomorrow" will require STEM skills and so we are feverishly "educating" our children to be prepared for their future roles in the economy. Setting aside the hubris embodied in the assumption that anyone can predict what jobs our preschoolers will grow up to hold, science, technology, engineering and math are important aspects of what it means to be human and fully worthy of exploration whether or not one is going to one day require specific employment skills.

These boys are swinging while simultaneously trying to avoid being hit by the swinging tire, a game that involves science, technology, engineering, and math, among other things.

Science, after all, is the grown-up word for play. As N.V. Scarfe wrote while discussing Einstein, "The highest form of research is essentially play." I know a number of scientists and whenever they are discussing their work, they describe it as play: "I was playing with the data and guess what I discovered," or, "I played with the variables and you won't believe what I found." Conversely, the highest form of play is essentially science as children ask and answer their own questions with both rigor and joy without the soul-sucking artifice of rote.

Working on math skills at the art easel.

Technology, which is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, is how children typically extend their play, building upon their discoveries to further explore their world.

Engineering is the process by which children create their technologies, be they dams intended to hold back flowing water or springboards designed for jumping into it.

Exploring a circle

And math is something humans have to be taught to hate because, after all, it is the process of learning increasingly complex and wonderful ways to do things that give us great pleasure as human animals: patterning, classifying, and sequencing. When we boil it down, that's the entirety of math, which is ultimately the foundation of analytical thinking.

Constructive play forms the foundation of engineering knowledge. In this case, she is also exploring set theory, including the  horses in one set while relegating the other types of animals to another.

The tragedy of STEM education in the early years, however, is that too many practitioners have concluded that we must engage in extraordinary measures to teach it, that without lectures, worksheets, and drill-and-kill testing it simply won't happen, which is, in the lexicon of a generation long before mine, pure hogwash.

This two-year-old is exploring the technology of a lever or a balance scale, striving to find a balance point.

STEM education is not a complicated thing, children are already doing it when we leave them alone to pursue their own interests in a lovely, varied, and stimulating environment. We can, however, destroy their love of science, technology, engineering and math by turning it into the sort of rote learning that involves authoritarian adults dictating what, how, and by when particular knowledge is to be acquired or skills learned. A good STEM education, at least in the early years, is a play-based one; one that takes advantage of a child's natural curiosity; that gives free rein to their boundless capacity for inventiveness; and that understands that vocational training is but a small part of what an education should be about.

These hydraulic engineers spend their days working together to manage the flow of water.

When we step back and really observe children in their "natural habitat," which is while playing, we can see the STEM learning, although it takes some practice because it's intertwined with the other important things they're working on like social-emotional skills, literacy, and the capacity for working with others, which is, at bottom, the most important "job" skill of all. Indeed, while we are only guessing at what STEM skills our preschoolers are going to need in the future, we do know that getting along with our fellow humans is the real secret to future employment, not to mention happiness.

What happens when I stick this in there?

When my wife was a preschooler, no one envisioned computers on every desktop, let alone on every laptop. The internet hadn't even made an appearance in science fiction novels. And we all carried dimes in our pockets just in case we needed to make a call on a public phone. Today she is the CEO of a software company by way of the automotive industry by way of the jobs that her study of languages made available to her when she stepped into the workforce. The problem with predicting what specific "job" skills our children will need in the future is that we can only guess, because it's not us, but the children themselves who will invent those jobs, just as my wife has invented her own STEM career.

That said, when we allow children to explore their world through play, we see that they are already scientists, technologist, engineers, and mathematicians. We don't create them, but rather allow the time and space in which those natural drives can flourish, and that's how we ultimately insure that our children not only have the narrow skills that may or may not be necessary for those jobs of tomorrow, but also for the broader purpose of living a good life.

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A Truly Beautiful Bowl Of Soup

"Oh mother, we must finish making our soup!"

"Yes dear, we will, but first we need some more roasted potatoes."

"Yes mother."

The girls were doing what children have done forever: making mud soup in a bucket. Their game had dramatic urgency as they rushed about gathering ingredients, stirring them in with a shovel, then foraging about for more. I couldn't help but connect their game to our human ancestors who spent their days hunting and gathering: they were playing an ancient game, one somehow passed down through the generations.

No one teaches this to children, but on every playground, in every backyard, in any place where children have access to water, containers, and something to gather, they make their soups and stews. These are typically not solitary games. They are games of community, of working together, of negotiating, and sharing, games that tie us together in the present as much as they tie us to our common past.

"Oh, it's not ready yet mother."

"Yes dear. You have to keep stirring."

This particular game was about a mother and her daughter, about one child pretending to teach and reassure the other the way parents do. This particular game was a polite game, where everyone spoke solicitous words in clear, calm voices. It was both artificial and aspirational, I think, as the girls examined relationship from a dispassionate place, like in a storybook.

This making of mud soup is not mere child's play. It is the work of a lifetime; soup every human who has ever lived must learn to cook.

"Mother, is it ready yet? The guests will be here soon."

"Yes dear, it's ready now."

As they offered me the first bowl of their roasted potato soup, I noticed that it contained dozens of green cherry tomatoes and marigold blossoms from our garden. It was a truly beautiful bowl of soup.

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