MONSTEROUS IMAGINATIONS
Yesterday we talked about child psychologist Elkind’s stages of child development—infant, six to twelve years olds, and adolescence—and how these stages correspond with our literary tradition: picture books, middle-grade, and young adult books. Let’s look at them more closely now, and see what we might be losing if technology is dramatically changing children’s play.
“Infants and young children dawdle because they are looking at the world with fresh eyes and ears,” says Elkind about the first stage of development. “They are caught up and excited by much that we take for granted and no longer find of interest.”
This is the age of loving sound, song and rhymes. The age when we’re full of curiosity and want to understand the world, when we’re truly discovering the world through play. (It’s also the age first targeted, and pretty uselessly, according to Elkind, by such infant learning shows as Teletubbies, and computer software like Baby WOW.)
Is screen media useful to an infant or a toddler? Can they actually put themselves to work and learn in the way such media intends? Consider what Joyce Carol Oates says in The Faith of a Writer, about this harrowing and fascinating time of life.
“In the beginning, for the child, there is only life, and consciousness; ‘play’ is indistinguishable from both. No child, not even the prodigy Mozart, ‘plays’ for professional purposes, nor even to define himself as talented, a worthy object of others’ attention.”
Infants and toddlers aren’t thinking of themselves as professionals. They dwell in the magical realm of the imagination. Do you remember those years of constant astonishment? Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood, describes the power of her freewheeling imagination this way.
“When I was five, growing up in Pittsburgh in 1950, I would not go to bed willingly because something came into my room. This was a private matter between me and it. If I spoke of it, it would kill me.”
It would kill me. At five, Dillard’s imagination was so all consuming she couldn’t reason with it. And while this is terrifying for a child, who can argue the value of what Dillard’s wild, untamed mind later produced?
A GOING WORLD
Elkind calls a child’s second stage of development as “the age of reason.” This stage begins between ages four and six and lasts until ten or twelve. He describes it in terms of literature this way: “Before the age of reason a child prefers rhymes and poems that are simple sequences of events.” For example,
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.
Such rhymes appeal to young children because the “images are general, concrete and here and now. Playful and amusing, with unexpected outcomes.”
But with the age of reason kids’ interest turns instead to books like Winnie the Pooh with its somewhat complicated characters and plot. Soon children develop a love of games with rules, tag, hide-and-seek and Marco Polo. They adore jokes and clubs and secret play places. Books such as Bridge to Terabithia become beloved. Yet it’s still not a time, Elkinds cautions, for advanced technology to rule the day.
“Children are not naturally motivated to learn from formal instruction,” he says. “Parents and teachers are most effective if they build on children’s love of stories, contrasts, rhythm and rhyme, unexpected facts, and humor.”
Annie Dillard says of this time in her life that, “…so many times a day the world, like a church bell, reminded me to recall and contemplate the durable fact that I was here, and had awakened once more to find myself set down in a going world….”
Is this a time to reel in the imagination? Or to let it expand?
Development is relatively slow at this age, says Elkinds, compared to the leaps children make as infants. In today’s world, we tend to structure kids’ lives at this stage, both in school and with outside lessons. Sometimes too much.
“Learning is most powerful when it involves self-initiation and personal motivation,” Elkind writes. “This is most likely to happen when young people play when they want to play , for how long they what to play and with whom they want to play.” But Elkind laments that in America we have fewer and fewer places for such play. So much so that “we Americans are losing our preeminence in our own national sport—baseball.”
FAST DRIVING
In early adolescence, too, Elkinds finds us losing out on age appropriate activities. As puberty begins during ages twelve to fifteen, the heavyweight emotion—love—takes over. Academics get the back seat to this new wonder. As Dillard describes this time in her life, “…you wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys.”
Wouldn’t “the seventh grade slump” be better spent, Elkind wonders, using a form of play to learn the basics of relationships and coping skills, by staging a play or building a boat? And this is a great time for adults, he notes, to play alongside their children, sharing their own forms of recreation with them, such as hiking, swimming or dancing.
“So this was adolescence,” Dillard writes. “Is this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? ….and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through the dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted.”
But adjustment does come, and with it we’ve earned late adolescence, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Now play becomes “institutionalized” and our creative potential is funneled into the arts: Music, acting and writing.
But the path still isn’t easy.
“Funny how badly I’d turned out,” Dillard writes. “Now I was always in trouble…. I loved fast driving.” A good thing for us that she realized her potential in adulthood, not discarding play for work as some adults do, but embracing it.
As Joyce Carol Oates says of this final transition into adulthood, “All writers—all artists—may be classified as romantics, for the very act of creating, and of caring enough to create, is a romantic gesture. What begins as child’s play ends, not ironically so much as rather wonderfully, as a ‘vocation,’ a ‘calling,’ a ‘destiny’—”
GEOGRAPHERS OF IMAGINATION
The truth is you can’t deny your destiny. Not and be a fully realized human being. So if you fear you can’t “keep up” with technology and its sometimes numbing effects on the imagination, why not reconnect instead. Recharge your work with what’s most basic and essential from childhood. Reconnect with those stages of play in your own life. And never doubt that the power of play is also the power of books.
“I began reading books, reading books to delirium,” says Dillard in An American Childhood. “I began by vanishing from the known world into the passive abyss of reading, but soon found myself engaged with surprising vigor because the things in the books, or even the things surrounding the books, roused me from my stupor.”
Books, like play, bring us back to ourselves. Without imagination and insight we wouldn’t have had the Brontë sisters, those “gifted, blessed or accursed children who are themselves, in childhood, geographers of the imagination,” as Oates calls them.
Think how the Brontë’s plays, mimes, games, and serial adventure stories were carried into their adulthood and resulted in some of our most enduring classics, including WutheringHeightsand Jane Eyre. Have more “enduring works of art ever been more triumphant than this?” Oates asks. “The memorization of childhood fantasy reimagined as adult passion and ‘fate’”?
And consider this. While I did give my niece that stuffed animal for Christmas (and thus a “virtual” pet), I also gave her a book. She had the flu the night we exchanged gifts, and she went down on the couch and took the book with her.
“I’ve already heard this one,” she told me, so I offered to exchange it.
“No!” she said, and clutched it close. “My teacher read it to us. It’s a good book!”
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