In the process of course preparation, I was looking for examples of how individuals use personal narratives as a strategy for building consensus. It being Presidents Day, my web search turned to A. Lincoln who used humor and stories to disarm critics as well as communicate the essence of policy decisions. As often happens with web searches, what we find is sometimes more interesting than what we were looking for. Hence this startling vignette about Lincoln's children in the White House.
Gifts poured into the White House after the Lincoln's moved in. Two of the favorite ones were goats named Nanny and Nanko. The president's sons hitched Nanny and Nanko to carts or kitchen chairs and drove them through the main floor of the White House. One time Tad harnessed Nanko to a chair and drove through the East Room during a White House reception. Dignified women pulled up their hoop skirts as Tad drove around the room and out the door again.
Amazing! Could we even imagine such a thing today. Perhaps the story is apocryphal, meant to illustrate the well publicized difficulty the Lincoln's had managing their children, but, for me, the point of is how radically things have changed for children. Such a carefree attitude about children's play and their permission to creatively engage their surroundings is simply unthinkable today. And recent research suggests that the declining opportunity for creative improvisational play is not a good thing for children's development.
Children's play today is highly regulated, scheduled and directed. It is focused on toys, passive entertainment, structured games, and achievement directed activities. What is missing is the freedom for children to explore, to remake their environments, to engage in improvised play in places where parental supervision is at a distance. In the Lincoln story, Tad was obviously engaged in improvised play, in using what was at hand to engage his environment, to be amazingly free to take risks.
For me, the Tad Lincoln story does not seem so unlikely. Growing up in a small Iowa town in 1950's, I can remember the freedom I experienced. My parents had little fear for my safety and had few expectations from their peers that they should be more watchful than than they were. Kids were expected to take care of themselves, keep busy, stay out of the way. My friends and I were master builders - everything from mud villages to tandem bikes. To build the tandem bike we went to the local repair shop and ask "Speed" Philips to show us how to braze the frames together. "Speed" stopped his work, showed us a few things, gave us safety glasses, tools, and his brazing materials and let us get to work. We took it from there.
When we were not playing, there was plenty of work to do. And the attitude of adults to our competence was remarkable. A few instructions and we were expected to manage from there. What this combination of improvisational freedom and high expectations produced were self-regulating adults who had a sense of their own competence.
I love to tell stories but I am not a romantic about the past. I realize that the freedom I experienced is difficult to recreate in a contemporary urban environment. There are few "wild" spaces, that is, few spaces that are not dedicated to something. Even our "open" spaces are owned for some activity or are restricted in their use. Ballparks are scheduled up, so it’s hard for kids to organize a pick up game. Kids pulling together a makeshift structure of limbs and scavenged material would be hounded by park supervisors for disturbing new plantings and damaging the fragile understory. And then there is our constant paranoia about the safety of our children who might encounter the untrustworthy stranger.
So what is to be done? How do we create spaces where child can creatively engage the world outside of their caregivers homes and just beyond the reach of their immediate supervision. First we should recognize that improvisational play is very important for children's development. Second, we should understand that dense populations and urban environments create special challenges for improvisational learning. Third we should understand that the urban environment is a creation of humans and as such is subject to creative adaptation and reformation. I will be writing about some of these adaptations in the future. In the interim you might want to link to the OPB story, Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills, and learn more about the research on improvisational play.
Charles Heying
