To be continued…
My two youngest children (yikes, they are ages 23 and 28) love to remind me that I am “as old as dirt”, which ties in beautifully to my thoughts today about the phrase, “to be continued”. When I was a kid in the dark ages, newspaper and magazine serials would carry a chapter an issue, with the possibility-filled closing phrase ending each installment: “to be continued”.
Thinking of that era of my childhood, I wonder if coincidence or cause and effect shaped the “to be continued” aspect of our play. I distinctly remember one entire summer of pretending my friends and I were lost children, staking our claim to survival in the wilderness as we attempted to build shelter from trimmed branches and find sustenance from the land (Mrs. Thompson’s cherry tree) and to cook using toy pots and cast off spoons from our mothers atop (mostly) imaginary fires. And a winter of trying to transform snow into an igloo—day after day after day; I remember the trial and the error (and freezing apples and cookies in our make-shift refrigerator) as we attempted to squeeze 5 of us in a space that would remain standing for at least an hour.
The most significant characteristic of those play episodes was that we returned to the same basic plot day after day, week after week, refining, tweaking and adding new scripts based on our real lives. Nancy Carlsson-Paige[1] writes compellingly about the need children still have for a place to play with open-ended props, day after day, their need for adequate time to return to a setting of their own creation again and again. There is magic to be mined when children can improvise on a theme, modifying their play to reflect their concerns and to explore solutions to problems. Sometimes those problems are mathematical (how the heck DO you get branches to become the walls of a “house”), sometimes those problems are social (Mary’s aunt is really, really sick and we pretend our way through the imaginary death of a parent) but the stories we pretend are compelling and engaging because they are of our making, not scripted by Disney or by an adult.
We would love to hear your stories of ways you’ve carved time and space and props so that your children can navigate worlds of their own making. Does it take more intention on the parts of parents today than it did for parents decades ago? Share your thoughts!
[1]Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Ed.D. Taking Back Childhood. New York: Hudson Street Press, 2008: 65-68.
