It's What Our Playing Children Know

Paleontologists now think that animal life first evolved on our planet 789 million years ago, although as the research continues it's likely that this oddly specific number will be supplanted. As most of us are aware, it was some time later than animals began to appear on land in the form of ancient "millipede." We currently believe that those early pioneers dragged themselves from their watery home more than 420 million years ago and there has been life on land ever since.

I like to think about the first animal to brave the land. What was it doing? Was it looking for food? Maybe. Maybe right there at the edge of the water there was, say, some particularly tasty fungi (which had already been around for some 1000 million years) or land plants (which had evolved 300 million years earlier). But why did this animal venture so close to shore in the first place? Maybe it was chased there by a predator, then, since it was already there in the shallows, something, some urge made it hunt around. Maybe there was some sort of decaying matter stuck to some rocks in the tidal zone that it followed from the water onto the land. Or, more likely, that early arthropod found itself on dry(er) land when the tide went out. The will to live then made it innovate the use of its multitude of tiny little fins to drag itself, painstakingly into a tidal pool where it bided its time, munching on land food, until the tide came back in.

Of course, there had likely been countless other animals that had, for whatever reason, come ashore, but this was the one who survived . . . And then, despite not have the lungs or legs for it, decided to try it again. I mean, this was a creature that had evolved to live out its life in the salty sea, but there was something about land that appealed to it. Maybe it was that there were no other animals out there seeking to eat it. A predator-free zone might have been just the ticket as the seas were becoming increasingly crowded with larger carnivorous beasts. Whatever the case, it came back, which was what set it apart from all the millipedes that came before it, and it brought some of its friends with it.

Evolutionary theory tells us that this isn't actually how it happened. My theoretical individual was, in reality, thousands, if not millions of generations of millipedes, but the metaphor, I think, is still worth considering. The first animals to emerge onto land may have found themselves there by some accident of fight-or-flight, or the pangs of hunger, but what made them come back, what made them press forward, what made them ultimately into the ancestors of humans (not to mention every other land species) was that once they'd escape the predators, once they'd sated their hunger, something made them fart around.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned science journalist David Toomey's new book Kingdom of Play. In it, he reminds us of Stanley Kubrick's own metaphor about ancient animals farting around: "(A) man-ape sits idly among a field of tapir bones. He has no evident purpose; he is only mildly interested in seeing what happens when bone strikes bone. He is playing. But then he discovers that when he brings a thigh bone down with enough force, it can break and shatter other bones. He has a sudden epiphany: the bone may be used as a weapon."

In the Grateful Dead's song Black Peter, Jerry Garcia sings, "I see now how everything leads up to this day." This is how we often understand evolution because looking back it all makes sense, but in reality, as it happens, the process of evolution has no sense at all. What amazes us, I think, and what makes many of us doubt evolution as a theory, is that it seems impossible that all of this (imagine me sweeping my arm to indicate the earth, mountains, sky, and all they contain) could have emerged without a plan or a guiding force with a plan. But to me, the vision of existence offered by evolution is even more amazing for it being, as Toomey points out in his book, entirely purposeless. What a wonderful, beautiful, thing to consider that all of this is the product of plants and animals farting around, which is to say playing.

Both evolution and play are, in the moment, purposeless, yet when we step back we see that they both serve as mechanisms through which life itself happens. The late great author Kurt Vonnegut asserts, "We're here on this earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." Increasingly, it seems that this might stand among the most universal of truths.

There probably never was an individual millipede that farted around the seashore, used its fins and feet, then became a role model for its friends. And it's highly unlikely that a single vaguely curious man-ape invented weaponry. But there is little doubt that the stories we tell ourselves about "progress" or "learning" are really just accidents of our perspective, looking to the past to "seeing now how everything leads up to this day." But all of this, right now, is just farting around. It's what our playing children know if we would just let them show us.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play Fighting

Like many modern parents, I'd not spent a lot of time around young children, as an adult, until our daughter was born. When she was two, we enrolled in a cooperative preschool, which for those who don't know, is a model in which parents attend alongside their children and serve as assistant teachers. This was my introduction, or re-introduction, to early childhood.

Of course, I had memories of my own childhood, but precious few, if any, from before I was four or five. So, when I remembered childhood, it was from the perspective of an older child, and many of those memories involved rough housing, or what we professionally call rough-and-tumble play.

My brother is only 20 months younger than me. Many of my childhood memories involve the two of us engaged in some version of play fighting. There was some real fighting too, but most of it was of the mutually agreed upon sort in which our physical competition was balanced over a fulcrum of cooperation.

For instance, since I was bigger and older, I tended to dominate when it came to traditional wrestling, so we came up with a version we called "kicky fight," in which we would lie on our backs and wildly kick at one another's legs. Often, when I would begin to overwhelm my younger brother, he would fall back into kicky fight mode, while I self-handicapped by trying to fight through his whirlwind of legs with my arms. One time he kicked out one of my teeth. But that was an accident, one that ended the play instantly. Hitting, or kicking, anything other than appendages, wasn't part of play fighting because the goal was not to hurt one another, but rather to, well, have fun.

Mom didn't intervene in our play fighting, other than to occasionally tell us to "keep it down." She insisted that if either of us got hurt we were to leave her out of it, although on those rare occasions when one of us did suffer pain, she was there to attend to us with minimal scolding. She had grown up with older brothers, so I imagine that's why she understood about play fighting.

There was very little play fighting at our cooperative preschool, or rather, whenever it erupted, the moment it erupted, an adult would step in to scuttle it. "No wrestling," we would say, or, "No fighting." It didn't strike me as particularly odd at the time. Of course, we don't want the kids fighting -- even play fighting. When, a few years later, I found myself as teacher of my own preschool class, I automatically carried on with "no fighting," although I'd learned to say it without the language of command, by making what I considered at the time to be a statement of fact, "Now is not the time for wrestling."

Whenever children began rolling around together, I'd say, "Now is not the time for wrestling," until one day a boy asked me in all eagerness, "When is wrestling time?" That's when it finally dawned on me that for some of these kids, especially those without siblings, it was never time for wrestling. 

Among the animals that play, and that includes all the mammals, birds, and reptiles ever studied and even some fish and insects, play fighting is the most common form of play. This should tell us something important about play fighting. There is no way that this particular behavior would be so universal if it wasn't an important adaptive trait. Indeed, play fighting's prevalence tells us that it has been evolutionarily selected as a behavior that supports survival and reproduction, yet here we are as early childhood educators systematically telling our young: "No fighting."

In his book Kingdom of Play, science journalist David Toomey writes: "Researchers have given little attention to a specific kind of rough-and-tumble play: play fighting . . . many recent textbooks on child development neglect the behavior, despite that it may represent nearly 20 percent of spontaneous play in school playgrounds, it seems remarkably similar across cultures, and so far as anyone can judge, it has changed little throughout history."

Cognitive psychologist Jaak Panksepp once conducted an experiment in which he showed adults video of rats engaged in play fighting. The adults all identified what they saw as real fighting. He then showed the video to four to seven-year-olds. They all accurately identified what they were looking at as "play." In other words, for whatever reason, adults in our society seem to be ill-equipped to understand and identify this sort of evolutionarily essential behavior for what it is. When I think back to my mother's attitude toward my own play fighting, I think I see an adult who was better able to see it. 

Where did we lose our ability to identify this kind of play? Is it because we've become so anti-violence that we see it even where it doesn't exist? Are we so worried about injury that we quash what appears to be a foundational behavior? Is it liability? Or are we just so concerned with controlling children that we simply cannot allow this rowdy, seemingly chaotic, behavior to exist?

I say "seemingly chaotic" because, as Toomey points out, those who have researched play fighting in animals find that there are indeed rules, often well-defined and ordered, "yet any play fighting may have moments during which one or both participants are uncertain of the other's intentions. These moments give both animals opportunities to practice theory of mind, to negotiate and to develop skills in general social competence and social assessment, skills necessary to forestall the escalation of actual fights and to avoid them to begin with." We've not done the requisite research into human play fighting, and we need to, but I think it's safe to say that what goes for our animal cousins, likewise goes for us. 

Toomey writes, "Although rough-and-tumble play can cause injury, it may endow the brain with a means to keep emotions in check. Play fighting in particular may provide training for the unexpected, and necessary practice in social skills. Children denied the opportunity to engage in play fighting may become adults deficient in the ability to emphasize, with little skill in negotiation and no notion of ambiguity. One can't help but wonder, Is it possible that some members of this generation of adults, politically polarized, with no ability to listen, let alone compromise, are this way because they did not play fight as children?"

Most importantly, however, is that those who have studied play fighting find that while animals are certainly competing, they are also cooperating. As Toomey puts it, "Play employs both competition and cooperation and holds them in a dynamic equilibrium." In this way, he says, play is like natural selection itself. "While natural selection certainly selects for better competitors . . . it also select for better cooperators." It's not a stretch to conclude that this is why play fighting is the most common, and therefore adaptive, type of play there is.

When I realized that for many of the children in my care it was never time to wrestle, I didn't have the benefit of knowing the research. I'd not thought of evolution or adaptive traits or the universality of play fighting. I only knew that play fighting was something good from my own childhood and I knew that it would be good for these kids. So I introduced "wrestling time" to our curriculum, which I've written about several times on this blog, including here.

Whenever we throw down the gym mats to wrestle, there is always a moment when I worry that it will all go wrong. That this time it will turn into violence or someone will be seriously injured or it will all spin out of control. But aside from the occasional bump or bruise, it never does because, as when my brother and I play fought, competition is always, beautifully, balanced over a fulcrum of cooperation, which is, at the end of the day, evolution at work.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

An Unplanned (and Unimaginably Cruel) Cultural Experiment

A friend who works with young children recently texted me with questions about why I thought kids today seem more anxious than in the past.

There are a lot of theories. Some blame screen-based technology, especially smartphones. Some blame the media. Some blame bad parenting. Some environmental toxins. Some blame a society that has gone off the rails. One of the most credible theories, however, is that our children are suffering from a deficit of good, old-fashioned play, and anxiousness is a symptom.

Most of the leading thinkers on play (e.g., Peter Gray, Jonathan Haight, Lenore Skenazy, Stuart Brown, Alfie Kohn, Maggie Dent) are convinced that this documented decline in childhood play is a direct cause of this documented increasing childhood anxiety. At one level, this remains theoretical, however, because no one has ever conducted play-deprivation studies on our own species. It's been demonstrated in rats and other mammals -- less play leads to more anxiety. But since it would be an unimaginable cruelty to perform experiments of this type on human children (not that animal research isn't just as cruel), we don't have, and probably never will have, the kind of direct, experimental link to human behavior that we would like. 

As neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp says, however, "I do suspect we are currently in an unplanned cultural experiment of that kind."

So while we bicker around the edges about things like the impact of smartphones and video games (which may just as easily be a form of self-medication) we, as a society, performatively scratch our heads as our children find themselves in childhoods in which play has been replaced with longer school days, shorter recesses, homework, sports teams, and all manner of after school and weekend enrichment programs, all supervised and controlled by adults. Rare is the contemporary American child who plays even a fraction as much as children from past generations.

So why would lack of play lead to anxiety?

There are a large number of theories for the widespread existence of play throughout the animal kingdom, humans included: to burn off excess energy, to destress, to practice skills and train muscles that will be necessary for adulthood, to create social bonds, to spur cognitive or language or moral development, all of which are probably part of the answer to a big question: why did play evolve in mammals, birds, reptiles, and even insects? 

Of course, it's not a stretch to connect missing any of this to increased anxiousness, but it's probably best explained (and predicted) by what is referred to as "training for the unexpected," a hypothesis proposed by researchers Marek Spinka, Ruth Newberry, and Marc Bekoff. 

In his new book, Kingdom of Play, science writer David Toomey offers a number of examples of animals that seem to surrender control or self-handicap while playing. A prime example comes from the work of Newberry with piglets. "When the piglets played, they often ran about . . . Running had an obvious adaptive advantage: it would be good practice for escaping a predator. But at no particular time and for no apparent reason, one piglet would suddenly stop running and perform a flop-over." 

So how is this training for the unexpected? "(W)hile running, free-ranging animals are likely to stumble, slip, fall, or collide with something. Spinka, Newberry, and Bekoff knew that the piglet flop-over was not good practice for escaping a predator in an idealized environment. It might, though, be good practice for recovering from a fall in a real one. Natural selection might have developed a means for animals to learn to recover balance by evolving in them a desire to put themselves in situations where they will be thrown off-balance. "We hypothesize," they wrote, "that a major ancestral function of play is to rehearse behavior sequences in which animals lose full control of their locomotion, position, or sensory/spatial input and need to repair those faculties quickly." 

Spinka and his colleagues believe that this self-handicapping is not just an essential feature of play, but it's most essential feature. In other words, play has evolved to allow us to prepare for handling the unknown and unexpected slings and arrows of life itself. No wonder that children who have been deprived of play feel anxious. They've missed out on the training.

When we watch young children play, we see this self-handicapping all the time. I've often watched children, for no apparent reason, like those piglets, throw themselves onto the ground, only to get back up and keep running. Even while engaged in such mundane activities like moving from point-A to point-B children inject self-handicapping play into their efforts. They pause to swing on a tree branch. They spontaneously or run up or roll down a hill. They balance on curbs, skip, walk backwards, dance, and otherwise do all kinds of things to make the seemingly simple journey from here to there more difficult and unpredictable than it objectively needs to be. A child might choose to pretend to be a baby, temporarily sacrificing walking and talking. Costumes restrict movement. And self-regulated rough-and-tumble play (the most universal form of play throughout the animal kingdom) always includes self-handicapping of all kinds in order to ensure the safety and enjoyment of everyone no matter their age or ability.

It's from playing in this way, according to Spinka and his colleagues, that animals practice for surviving in an unpredictable world. This is why play is such a prevalent feature of life itself, and is likely why a lack of play leads to animals that are overly anxious about their ability to deal with a life of unknowns.

The evidence for play deprivation being at the root of increased childhood anxiety is far stronger than for, say, video games, yet we continue to subject children to our unplanned and cruel cultural experiment in human play deprivation. Instead of heeding the clear results, we're drugging our children and shaming them for their use of smartphones, because to blame a lack of opportunities to play would mean a major, and likely disruptive, re-evaluation of modern childhood, which is to say, all of society.

We are also, right now, as a society, wondering why so many young people are lonely and angry. Back in the 1960's clinical psychologist Stuart Brown was part of three studies into the backgrounds of violent men. "What struck our separate research teams as unexpected," he wrote, "was that normal play behavior was virtually absent throughout the lives of highly violent, anti-social men regardless of demography." Again, popular culture would have us blame smartphones, video games, and the internet. Dr. Brown was so alarmed by his findings that he devoted the next 50 years to the study of and advocacy for childhood play.

It's past time that the rest of us take play deprivation seriously. And the first step is to, right now, take the children in your life outside and leave them alone to flop and fight and run. No one knows what to expect from tomorrow. Play is how we get ready for that.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Girl Team

Charlotte was one of those kids who had been coming to Woodland Park since before she was born, arriving first in our classroom in utero to drop off and pick up her older brother, then continuing on her own behalf until she was five. If I've ever known a student, it would be Charlotte, and among the many things I know is that she is not conflict averse: she will stand up for herself, and for righteousness in general, like few people I've ever known, whatever their age.

To say she knew her way around the place would be an understatement. When we began making our classroom agreements early in her third and final school year, she took the lead in creating a short, but very workable list, including the vital ones of "No hitting," "No kicking," "No biting," and "No taking things from other people." We would, of course, add to this list in the coming days and weeks, but we could in theory function as a community quite well with these dozen or so rules we had created to get started.

The following day, we played with our catapults. The kids fell on them enthusiastically. It was wild at first, although I was proud of how well the kids -- most of whom were just getting to know one another -- figured out how to share the five machines without any input from me. 

Naturally, they quickly began targeting one another with the ping pong balls. I was trying to stay out of the way, observing, and helping to retrieve balls that had gotten under furniture, waiting all the while for a signal from the kids that we needed to consider a new agreement: "No shooting other people with a catapult." It wasn't a problem yet, but I simply assumed that it would become one before too long and we'd soon have to figure out something else to "target," such as the alphabet blocks that I had handy for the purpose. This moment never came, at least not that day.

At one point, a group of four boys allied themselves as a team, "the boy team," leaving Charlotte all alone as "the girl team." She had her back against some shelves, in possession of one catapult, while the boys were arrayed with their catapults in an arc aimed toward her. The boys boasted to me about their potential fire power, talking about "doubles" and "triples." A couple balls were launched Charlotte's way, which she ducked, then grabbed before they bounced back to the boys. I checked in with her. While she didn't seem particularly happy, she also didn't seem upset. There was a determined look on her face. I asked, "Do you like this game?" She made it clear she didn't need me, so I went back to hunting for lost balls.

Moments later, however, she objected loudly, "Hey, no taking things!"

I asked, "Did someone take something? We all agreed: no taking things from other people." I pointed at where the freshly made list of rules hung on the wall and all eyes followed my finger.

That's when a boy complained, "But she has all the balls!" 

That's when I noticed that Charlotte indeed had a large collection of balls between her knees. Reluctantly abiding by our community agreement, the boys returned the one ball they'd snatched from her, this girl who'd figured out a way to even those apparently insurmountable odds. 

I couldn't help observing, "So you guys have all the catapults, and she has all the balls." 

While Charlotte sat upon her stash, the boys, still in their semi-circle, were dumbstruck, feeling, I suppose, how one feels when one has been checkmated. Maybe I should have kiboshed the boy-girl divide earlier. Perhaps I should have been more assertive in getting to the "No shooting each other" discussion. I could have handled it all differently, but at the same time, I really couldn't help but be proud of "the girl team." She had used her knowledge of the rules and her experience as a younger sister to masterfully work things around to a kind of victory that must have been satisfying to her. It sure was to me.

The stand-off lasted for several minutes, with the boys idly flipping their empty catapults while Charlotte stood her ground. A couple of the boys started hunting under furniture for balls, but without luck.

Finally, Archie crossed over to Charlotte and asked as politely as possible, "Could I please have one ball?"

With that Charlotte sat up and pushed the whole pile of balls toward the boys. Game over.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

To Listen With Our Entire Self

"Your wish is my command."

It's a phrase that originates in the Arabic folk tale Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. It's what the genii said to the boy who conjured him. It is meant as a declaration of gratitude for having been released from the prison of the lamp, one that the genii makes in earnest. He will, up to the limit of three wishes, obey the boy. 

Today, more often than not, when we use the phrase we mean it sarcastically, as a way of indicating that someone has us over a barrel. As autonomous modern humans, most of us have learned to be uncomfortable with ceding our behavior to the whims of others and to feel resentful when circumstances conspire to place us in the control of others. And even when we say or hear "Your wish is my command" spoken with the earnestness of the genii, we know that there are limits to any obedience, even if a great debt is owed.

I've written often here about the widely-accepted cultural notion that children should, at least when it comes to "important" things, obey the adults in their life. In my view, this is a dangerous thing to teach children because we know that the lessons learned in our youth have a way of carrying forward into adulthood and adults who have learned obedience are not adults who are well-equipped to make their own decisions. They tend to be people who look to others to do their thinking for them because, at the end of the day, that is what obedience is all about: it is about making another person's wish into our own command. Obedient people can be more easily made to do things against their own judgment or best interests, which makes them dangerous to themselves and others, and easy targets for bad actors.

I was surprised, therefore, to recently learn that linguists believe that the words "hear" and "obey" most likely originated as the same word. In Latin, the word obedire translates as "obey," which is the composite of ob + audire, which means to hear while facing someone. This is true for Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and Russian, as well as English.

Of course, meanings change over time and through usage, but I recognize that in my own life, hearing, and especially listening, is a kind of obedience.

As Julian Jaynes puts it: "Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us. In a certain sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We suspend our own identities, after which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding language; and if that language is a command, the identification of understanding becomes the obedience."

Jaynes is writing about understanding language specifically, but I think this goes for the entirety of interpersonal communication, which includes both verbal and non-verbal listening.

Not all of what we call "listening" falls into this category. Many of us, especially when we are in positions of power, as when we are adults with young children, merely perform a show of listening while we construct our response, or, as is too often the case when a child tells us a long-winded story, simply as a polite cover for the fact that we are merely waiting for them to come to an end, and lacking that, a space in which we can interrupt. But when we honestly listen, when we, as Eleanor Duckworth says, "listen with our entire self" it is an act of putting ourselves completely at the service of others.

The act of understanding another person is, however briefly, a necessary and voluntary act of obedience because (Duckworth again) ". . . we cannot assume that an experience whose meaning seems clear to us will have the same meaning for someone else."

Our profession as early childhood educators is too often wrapped up in the language and practice of adults controlling, dictating, telling, and "teaching," but the true art, the true practice of an educator is listening, to hear their wishes and make understanding them our command. 

As Mister Rogers writes, "I think the most important part about communication is the listening we do beforehand."

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Agreeing on Rainbow

We were making a rocket ship to use as a prop for a play the older kids had decided they wanted to stage for the last day of school. I'd procured a long cardboard box that the kids agreed would punch the ticket, but before we started, we needed to discuss exactly what kind of rocket ship this was going to be.

"Black!"

"No, purple!"

"Yellow and green!"

I was writing their nominations on a sheet of butcher paper. By the time we'd completed the list, there was no overlap. Each of the dozen or so kids had suggested a unique color or color combination. I read the list to them, finishing by asking, "How are we going to decide?"

Over the course of their years at Woodland Park, we had sometimes made group decisions by voting so it wasn't a surprise when someone suggested, "Let's vote!" Yes, they all wanted a vote, so I went down their list asking for a show of hands. Each option received, as one might predict, one vote. It was a tie. There was some discussion around this, including some persuasion and negotiation, then a call for a second vote. We were able to eliminate a few, but were still left with a half dozen options.

Of course, that's when someone had an idea: "Let's paint it rainbow!"

This wasn't the first time I'd facilitated a process like this and it was far from the first time that children had hit on the compromise of "rainbow." Indeed, I'm sure it's happened somewhere, but I've never personally witnessed a group of preschoolers who did not opt for rainbow under these circumstances. The conventional wisdom is that a good compromise is one about which no one is entirely happy, but in the case of rainbow, it always seems to delight everyone. Oh, there might still those who would prefer an all pink rocket ship, but the manifest fairness of rainbow, the epiphany of rainbow, the way the children celebrate when they've arrived at this collective decision, tells me that agreement, at least in this case, supersedes individual opinions.

Philosopher John Rawls' "veil of ignorance" is one of the best known thought experiments of the 20th century. He asked, essentially, what kind of social structure would we would want to create if no one knew in advance what position they were going to occupy?

It's fascinating to think about. Like with the children, most of us would wish for a social structure in which fairness was its hallmark. Some of us might opt for fairness out of a selfish fear of awakening to discover we've been randomly assigned to a position of disadvantage, but most of us, I hope, are like these preschoolers: we choose fairness because, well, it's only fair.

Before painting anything rainbow, I've learned to ask the children to do their own thought experiment: what happens when you mix all the colors together? Gray, maybe brown. No preschooler ever wants gray or brown. (Although, interestingly, I've been part of several adult groups charged with deciding on a color for, say, a classroom, or church hallway, or an apartment building lobby, and the compromise is almost always some version of gray or brown.) So then we must discuss how we are going to ensure we get a rainbow and not some version of mud. In the case of the rocket ship, we decided that each kid would choose a color and a section to paint. Then, in agreement, we got to work.

As I watched the rocket ship take its colorful shape, I saw the kind of social structure for which I would wish. Here we were, shoulder-to-shoulder toward a common end, each with space for their own color while making space for the colors of others, taking joy not in getting our own way, but in that together we were magnificent enough to agree.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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Training for the Unexpected

In science journalist David Toomey's new book Kingdom of Play, he writes about an animal geneticist and ethologist named David Wood-Gush who established the "Edinburgh Pig Park," a place where domesticated animals were allowed to roam freely. The idea was that they could live as closely to their natural state as possible, yet still be easily studied by scientists. It was known at the time that pigs that played more tended to healthier, so Wood-Gush and his colleague Ruth Newberry decided that understanding more about pig play would lead to more humane treatment of pigs.

Like many mammals, one of the forms of pig play is to run around. This makes sense to scientists because, according to one of the major theories about the function of play in animals is that it allows us to practice skills we might need in the future. Running is obviously a good way to avoid future predators. One thing that surprised the researchers, however, was that periodically, while in the midst of running, piglets would, for no apparent reason, fling themselves upon the ground, scramble back to their feet, then continue running. This seemed like a less adaptive behavior. Indeed, it seemed like a good way to wind up as lunch.

Newberry continued to pursue this question and, along with colleagues in the US, came up with an idea they called "training for the unexpected." In the real world, an animal is running in natural terrain, which means it's littered with tripping and slipping hazards. The pig flop-over, they speculated, was in fact practice for the real possibility of having to recover from a fall while being pursued. "We hypothesize that a major ancestral function of play is to rehearse behavioral sequences in which animals lose full control of their locomotion, position, or sensory/spatial input and need to repair their faculties quickly."

There is no agreed upon definition of what play is among scientists, but this notion of "training for the unexpected" has become central to our current efforts to understand what play is all about. Evidence of this phenomenon is all around us. Young children are famous for putting themselves into disorienting positions. I've watched countless children doing their own version of the piglet flop. Children spin on swings, roll down hills, and diverge from almost every straight-and-narrow path in order to clamber or climb. Often their "flops" are objectively risky behaviors. And we all know that once is rarely enough, they must do it again and again and again, which is the hallmark of practice or training.

It doesn't make much of a stretch to see that their dramatic play is likewise an aspect of this phenomenon. By pretending to be someone or something they are not, they are preparing themselves to respond to the surprises that life will inevitably offer them. In contrast, so much of what we call schooling is focused on the knowable, the predictable, the standard, and planning for the future, but we all know that much of life as it's lived, perhaps most of it, is about how we respond to the unexpected, the tripping and slipping. As the Yiddish adage has it, "Man plans and God laughs." Play is, in this context, how animals prepare to get the last laugh: we may fall, our plans may go awry, but because we played, we know how to get back up and keep going.

We are currently experiencing an alarming spike in childhood anxiety, with children as young as three being treated for it. This is not true of all anxiety, but much of it manifests as fear of the future, and specifically a fear that we will not be up to the unexpected challenges that lie ahead. It's not a coincidence that the incidence of childhood anxiety is peaking at the same time that children are experiencing a deficit of play. As psychologist and retired professor of research Peter Gray writes, "Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing . . . the rise in mental disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in children's freedom." In a world in which children are not free to play, in which they are over-protected and over-managed, in which they are forever being groomed exclusively for the expected and shielded from the unexpected, we are robbing them of opportunities to prepare themselves for the unexpected. No wonder they're anxious.

When an individual piglet flops, of course, it doesn't know it's training for the unexpected. It's doing it because it's fun thing to do. It's so fun that they do it again and again. Porcine play, like human play, like the play of animals ranging from bees to octopuses to elephants, has evolved as an almost universal adaptation to world in which man plans and God laughs. We are meant to do fun things, even if they are a bit risky. As the German philosopher and psychologist wrote in his groundbreaking 1896 book The Play of Animals, "The animal does not play because he is young. He has a period of youth because he must play."

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!