When did we stop playing? When exactly was the mischievous sparkle in our eyes replaced with earnest concentration? When did we stop laying on our stomach, kicking our feet carelessly up and down, and get lost in a beautiful story that whisks our imagination away to fascinating and strange places? Maybe we started to calculate the cost, worry about what other people thought about us, and didn’t want to bother people by making a scene. Maybe we just got boring. Maybe we have trouble letting children play in unstructured settings, unfettered by guidance and rules, because we have forgotten how to ourselves. Maybe we are so far removed from carefree enthusiastic zeal that we don’t remember how it feels. Maybe this is part of what makes many adults so bad at working with children and youth. Maybe we are slowly training the joy out of their eyes with tasks and order. Scary thought.
I have forgotten know how to play. I attended a workshop a little while back where the presenters asked us to re-imagine how we engaged with our senses. We were encouraged to not only smell what we were expected to smell but rather to hear smells. We were blindfolded and given things to touch and asked to see and taste how they felt without looking at them or putting them in our mouths. For a bunch of Masters students comfily wrapped in the warm blanket of academia, we were challenged on a whole new level. There were various area’s staged in different sections of the room and often we were left with no instruction. We were told to simply play. We had all forgotten how. We needed guidance; our collective mantra was: “so... (confused pause) what exactly am I supposed to be doing here?” I couldn’t help but think that the polar opposite would have been the case with a group of children.
If children, assuming that their profound capacity for creativity and imagination had not been sucked dry by electronic games, were given a room with a fascinating combination of textures, sights, and smells, they would have played. In fact, I think they would have been disappointed if they were given rules to follow! Their simple joy of just playing would have been robbed by having to conform to a set of expectations about how the play was supposed to go. (Just writing the last sentence unsettles me.) Yet this is how we approach working with children and youth.
We witness children’s behaviours, which are self-constructed coping mechanisms to deal with traumatic events no one should ever have to endure, especially children, and tell them to stop. We replace their socially unacceptable actions with ones that society can live with. What if we began to see their behaviours as an accusation of a system that has failed to protect them and then taught them to behave in a way that doesn’t further upset the system. It’s like telling a young boy, who is enduring physical abuse at the hands of his father to stop acting out to get noticed at school. It’s like teaching him to cover up the cry of his spirit so that he doesn’t annoy the teacher or the other students. It’s asking him to quietly disappear into anonymity so we don’t have to confront a problem that we’re too scared to confront.
How are these two scenario’s even remotely comparable? They are connected by a system (that is created by all of us) that is uncomfortable with adults playing with unbridled enthusiasm and wonder. It is a system that says that we must make money to be good providers. It is a system that says that if we can’t do this, we are failures. Skott-Myhre accuses capitalism of being an addiction because it cannot possibly deliver on what it promises (Hans Skott-Myhre, personal communication, November 30, 2015). Now we have removed joy and replaced it with an ideal that most adults are going to fail at. We replaced fun with crippling debt and hopelessness. When this system fails families and an overwhelmed father beats up his child because it is the only thing he perceives that he has control over, we take away his child. We train his boy to not further upset the capitalist regime that oppressed his family to the point of faltering, and then we blame his father for being a bad parent. We shake our heads at his failure and wonder how anyone could ever end up like that. But maybe by training his son to so carefully fit into this system, we are arbitrarily training up the next abuser.
Perhaps our biggest act of resistance will be returning to play. Immersing ourselves in embracing wonder could be our only hope. Maybe Child and Youth care needs to have more fun. Maybe we need to get on our hands and knees and watch an anthill with a child for an hour. Maybe we need to return to seeking novelty and joy. It’s time to take our shoes off and feel the grass and the sand. It’s time to play a game that has no rules or structure, no winners or losers, and no time limit. It’s time to join the children who haven’t forgotten to have fun, look them in the eye, and with all sincerity, ask them to teach us to be fun again. (Notice I didn’t say: to have fun again, I said be fun)
After all, what do we have to lose? Go be fun.