Zeldar’s thread on “Plike” caused me to think about a conversation I’ve had on occasion with other people who have children. I have a matched set of three and I have never heard any of my kids ever use plike, but I don’t think they have ever played games like Army or Cowboys and Indians either; there were simply too many other more immediate things competing for their attention, like TV and video games. When I was a kid, children’s programming was limited to Saturday morning and a show or two during the week sandwiched in that little slot between getting home from school and dinner. We had a lot of time to kill and so we did it as The Lone Ranger and Tonto.
Some of my friends suggest that children are more passively involved in their entertainment—essentially that the game or program does all their thinking and emotional investment for them—and that as a result they aren’t used to doing it for themselves and are therefore less imaginative.
Personally I don’t see a difference in my kids’ powers of imagination, so I think the argument is bogus: I think that imagination for my kids finds outlets that are simply different than the ones I used to have.
Members of older generations always think today’s kids have it easy/are spoiled/lack imagination. Baby Boomers, if you recall, spent their days in front of the boob tube and had to be forced to go outside. Video games were, if anything, an improvement in terms of requiring some level of engagement if not much imagination.
From what I can recall about playing Cowboys and Indians and the like, there wasn’t much imagination involved. “I got you!” “No, you missed. I got you!!” “No, I got you!” and so on. Hot Wheels cars and plastic army men offered some opportunity for making up story lines, but I was on my own. The boys I knew as a pre-teen were not creative sorts–they were into sports and not much else.
It wasn’t until I was 13 or 14 that I had a friend that shared my interest in creating things – writing stories, making music, making up our own sports, discussing philosophical concepts – and we were widely regarded by the other boys as weirdos and probably homos. I never met a girl with the least bit of imagination until high school either.
I expect there are some kids with no imagination out there. I don’t know them myself though. My kids’ friends all seem normal enough that way. And my 7yo does pretty much nothing but live in a wonderland in her head, populated by a mishmash of unicorns, ninjas, fairies, Jedi, complicated Lego constructions, and–today–bats. She has spent the last two days dancing around the house, singing “Batty batty bat” and dressing up as the Bat Queen.
Nah, Aswan, I think kids are still retaining their imaginations as much as ever. A recent scientific study showed the youngest Kerrkid (now 10) could look at clouds and discern shapes out of them as well as any of my peers and I ever did.
He also spent much of the last year playing by himself with a stick, using it as a weapon and playing some sort of battle game by himself, often for hours at a time. I’m sure he didn’t want me to know exactly what and so I didn’t ask (he always kind of stopped whenever I show up) but I never saw any animal carcasses or body parts around so I figured it must be fine.
Of course, he’s a son of a Doper, so he could be skewing the results.
