Book Review: A Child's Work

San Francisco Chronicle:

Playing make-believe is the serious business of childhood

Reviewed by Elizabeth Corcoran
Sunday May 30, 2004

A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play

By Vivian Gussin Paley

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; 111 PAGES; $19

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Like our obsession with finding the next great diet, American public opinion about how we educate our children boomerangs from one extreme to another. One day we're all for letting them roll around in the mud; the next, we tell them to sit quietly at desks as we test them on verb conjugation.

Propelled by the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" policy, mainstream public education has most recently swung toward the formal side. Reading and writing are the hunter-gatherer skills of our age. Kindergarten has become the place to learn them. By second grade, we start giving children standardized tests to assess how much they've learned. Have we gone too far? Are we raising children with heads so densely packed with "facts" that their imaginations will slip away like dreams?

In a new slim volume, "A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play," Vivian Gussin Paley contends that we "perform a grave error" when we discard fantasy play as the foundation of early childhood education. Paley is an important voice: She spent 37 years as a kindergarten teacher at the famed University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and has written a dozen books on early education. Her essay is a richly detailed reminder of the enormously important role of imaginary play -- but falls short of arguing convincingly that it should be the basis for early education.

Playing make-believe is the gold dust of childhood. Pretend play helps children build dreams, grapple with fears, experiment with language and social rules and sharpen their observations about the world, and bestows a thousand other unrecognized blessings, Paley writes. Through imaginary games, children test how the world works and where they fit in. Pretend to be a baby and crying is OK. Pretend to be a firefighter and you must act brave. Fantasy play lets children try out roles and behaviors with little fear of adverse consequences. You can be a wicked wizard in the morning and a heroic knight by snack time. In either case, your friends will still sit next to you. This is good, Paley points out. "When play is curtailed, how are [children] to confront their fantasy villains?" she asks.

Teachers can also use stories to convey lessons. Paley describes how "Franklin" kept disrupting play in the corner of her classroom devoted to building blocks. Just telling Franklin to play nicely didn't work. Paley resorted to storytelling: "Once there was a boy who had a big problem in blocks. Pretend I'm that boy," Paley told her class. She began waving her arms and shouting. The real Franklin laughed. "That's me! You're pretending me, right?" Paley then asked Franklin to pretend to be a child called "Good Player, " who knew how to cooperate with others. He did. After that, whenever Franklin lost control, his classmates would remind him to "play" a different character. "Hey Franklin, you're pretending the wrong boy, remember?"

Through "play," Paley gently gave Franklin instructions he could follow, rather than reprimanding him or isolating him in "time-outs." But Paley's thesis gets hazy when she writes about how teachers should be guided by children's stories. As a teacher, Paley writes, "I rarely paused to listen to the narratives blooming everywhere in the garden of children in which I spent my days. I saw myself as the bestower of place and belonging, of custom and curriculum, too often ignoring the delicate web being constructed by the children in their constant exchange of ideas."

And so? Paley doesn't finish the thought. She recites another classroom conversation -- "Let's both be baby sisters and our nice mother isn't lost yet" -- then wonders what it means. "These were the dialogues that had begun to fill my journals and there was never enough time to follow up every intriguing notion and original idea." Not every game of "make-believe" need teach a lesson, but as a parent, I want my children to take away more from their teachers than their teachers take from them.

Strikingly absent from this book is any discussion of what happens to children outside the classroom. On one end of the spectrum are children with schedules as crammed as those of corporate executives: swim lessons, ballet, karate, T-ball, music -- maybe even a foreign language and cooking. Paley's work should send a message here: Lighten up, folks. Close your eyes, open your imaginations and play "pretend" with your kids. At the other extreme are children who live in a world stripped of anything resembling healthy educational experiences.

Teachers need to nurture these children's imaginations, but it also stands to reason that these children desperately need teachers to help them learn the basics that other families take for granted: the ABCs, counting and the colors of the rainbow. Early childhood education should not resemble an Atkins diet of pure instruction and no make-believe. Neither should it be the other way around. Paley does children a great service by reminding us of the enormous value of fantasy play. Our job, as parents and educators, is to give children time to pretend they've fallen down a rabbit hole, without neglecting the skills they will need to read what Wonderland looked like to Alice.

Elizabeth Corcoran is a contributing editor at Forbes.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/30/RVGQQ6PUKP1.DTL

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Telling Tales

(originally published in the Burlingame Mother’s Club Newsletter)

Once upon a time, there was a mother who loved taking walks. When her first child was born, she strapped him into a Snuggli and walked for hours. As he grew a bit bigger, she would nestle him into a stroller and go for leisurely jogs. He grew sturdy and strong and she eagerly looked forward to the day when they would stroll, hand in hand, around their neighborhood.

But soon it was clear there was a problem: he just didn’t want to walk. It wasn’t that he couldn’t. The child could run like a squirrel when the mood struck him. But rather than walk with his mother, the boy would throw himself on the sidewalk and howl. The mother pleaded with her son to walk. She promised him cookies. She got mad and threatened to walk off. Nothing worked. Then one day, she had an idea. She began telling him a story: “Once upon a time, there was a baby caterpillar with twenty legs…”

No one can resist the tug of a story. And every parent—really, anyone at all—has a treasure trove of stories locked in their head. All we have to do is get them out.

Everyone tells us that children love to hear their mother sing, whether or not she can carry a tune. What they forget to tell us is that every child craves to hear stories told by their parents—“with your own mouth,” as my littlest one likes to say.

True confession: I started telling my first son, Matthew, stories when he was very small to coax him to go for walks. I’d start the story—then begin strolling. It was magic: instead of fussing, he would trot alongside, eager to hear every twist. Now, at age 7, he’s a great walker and has an insatiable love of stories.

Although I’ve been a journalist all my adult life, I have had no formal training in making up stories for children. Over the past few years, however, I’ve conjured up hundreds of stories to amuse and distract my boys. Story telling, I’ve realized, is much like cooking: You can, of course, whip up a simple story from scratch. You can make up a fine story using “prepackaged” materials. And, with a bit of practice, you can weave a gourmet tale with more parts than a nine-course meal. Like cooking, the only prerequisite is utter confidence.

Here is the list of ingredients and a few of the short-cuts I use to make up stories. Although it may seem like a bit of work at the beginning, you’ll discover that as you tell more stories, your cupboard will become packed with characters, plots and twists that will make story telling a cinch.

Ingredients:

1. Characters: You only need two or three characters for a good story. The logical star for many of your stories, of course, is your child! (Who doesn’t want to be the hero of a story?) Beloved stuffed animals are another good bet. Other sorts of creatures—lions, dragons, witches—are also favorites.

Once upon a time, there was a baby caterpillar with twenty legs.

2. The plot: Seize the moment. Every child likes to hear stories about familiar stuff. There’s nothing more familiar than the situation at hand. Heading off to the park? Then tell a story about a character going to the park. Bedtime? Tell a story about a character going to bed.

More than anything else, he wanted to walk to a nearby park where there was a tree with leaves so delicious they tasted like candy. “Please, Mommy,” he said, “can’t we go for a walk to the park?”

3. Conflict: Every good story has an element of conflict. And every good mother encounters plenty of conflict every day. Is your child fighting bedtime? Refusing to eat green vegetables? Does she insist on wearing the same pink socks day after day, whether or not they’re clean? Even better: flip-flop the situation. Maybe your character is begging to do something that your child resists.

“Oh,” sighed his mother. “Aren’t you tired from playing all day? Are you sure you really want to go to the park?”

“Oh, yes,” said the little caterpillar. “I’ve got lots of energy!”

4. The comic twist: Here’s where you can be really creative. You’ve described a character and situation in your story. Now add an element of absurdity. The crazier, the better. Why not a story about an animal who really, really wants to go to bed—but spaceships, dinosaurs and a licorice-wielding wizard keep stopping it from getting to sleep? Or, a creature who loves peas and hates candy—but is forced to eat only candy, all day and all night, by a wicked witch?

So, the mother caterpillar inched her way to the closet and started to pull out all the little caterpillar’s shoes. You have to remember that the little caterpillar wore 20 shoes at once. First the mother put on a pair of blue shoes and laced them up, one on the right, one on the left. Then she put on a red pair of shoes, one on the right, one on the left. Then she put on a pair of shoes with blinking lights in the heel, one on the right, one on the left…[you get the idea. Somehow, little kids often think such repetition is pretty funny. Ask your child to start adding examples to the list.] By the time the caterpillar’s mommy had laced up the very last shoe, which had pink and green polka dots, the little caterpillar had fallen fast asleep. The mother caterpillar gave a great big sigh—then started to unlace each and every shoe—and finally put the little caterpillar to bed.

5. The resolution: personally, I love happy endings. If your child is the star of the story, then let them do something heroic. If the story is about a creature, then invent an ending where the creature has a “great idea” and creatively solves a problem, or learns a lesson, or makes a friend or somehow winds up with a smile on its face. If you’re really stuck, ask your child what he or she thinks should happen. Chances are, the answer will surprise and delight you.

The next day, the little caterpillar had a great day, going to caterpillar school, learning what it would take to become a butterfly, playing with his friends and nibbling on tasty leaves. Toward the end of the day, the little caterpillar once again begged his mother to take him to the park.

“Oh please, Mommy!” said the little caterpillar. “Please, please, please! ”

“Oh dear, my darling little fluff ball. I’d love to take you to the park but I’m afraid that by the time we get on all your shoes, you’ll fall asleep again!”

[You can, of course, drag it out and go through the shoe scene all over again. Or not. Hey, it’s your story.]

All of a sudden, the little caterpillar had a Great Idea. “Mommy, look! Haven’t we seen that boy in the park before?”

Sure enough, the mother caterpillar looked up and saw a little human boy who looked very familiar. The caterpillars had often seen him in the park playing very near the tree with the tasty leaves. Even better—the backpack that he always carried with him was lying on the ground nearby.

“Let’s go!” said the mother caterpillar. In a few moments the pair had wiggled into the backpack and was soon on the way to the park. But the mommy hadn’t forgotten the little caterpillar’s shoes. She pulled out her own sack, filled with all twenty pairs. “Okay,” she said, as they bumped along in the little boy’s backpack. “Let’s start with a red shoe on your right foot…”

Premixed ingredients: Don’t hesitate to borrow story themes from tried and true fairy tales like Goldilocks, little red riding hood, the three little pigs or your own personal favorites. (The three little pigs is a wonderful story for improvisation. Ever hear the story of the three little elephants and the mean, nasty mouse?)

Even better: tell your child a story about something that happened to you when you were a child. This is obviously a different kind of story: you are the central character, the events are true. But every child is fascinated by the image of Mom or Dad as a kid. You can tell them how “life was different” in the days before videos and computers. You can share stories about ups or downs that you faced that might be similar to something they are confronting. Tell them about your favorite pet, your scariest Halloween or the best birthday you ever had.

There are lots of garnishes you can add, of course—everything from using your voice to sound like different characters or acting out some of the parts. Most important: let your child help tell the stories. You’ll be amazed at the tales you’ll hear.

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