My SO has three children from a previous marriage. They are a boy aged 13, a girl aged 10, and another boy aged 7. Earlier today, we were discussing his kids’ play habits, and came to the conclusion that his kids play some games in a rather odd way. Or not. Who knows? I was an only child who liked listening to Mozart and pretending to conduct an orchestra, so I can’t judge.
For instance, if his kids are playing some kind of make-believe game, one will be in charge and tell the others what they’re supposed to say instead of allowing a normal give and take play experience.
Eldest - Hello. (to other kid,) Now you say hello.
Youngest - Hello.
Eldest - How are you. (to other kid) You say you’re fine.
Youngest - I’m fine.
Another thing they’ll do is set up huge, elaborate scenes of their toys and give every single character an extremely detailed back story. Instead of using this as a basis for a detailed and fun game, they just leave them set up and never play at all. The game IS setting up the toys and giving them all names.
So, any of your kids out there play in weird ways?
OMG, my almost-7 year old does this and it drives me freaking nuts.
This too!
She’ll also create a make believe scenario and plan for every single thing we do. “Pretend you own an ice cream shop and I’m the customer.” Can’t I just get you a bowl of freakin’ ice cream?! As above, it wouldn’t be so bad if she’d let me role-play, but no, it’s all, “Now ask me if I want a cup or cone…” “Now ask me if I want sprinkles…”
When I was a kid we did the second thing with Barbies (well, with other people’s Barbies - I wasn’t allowed to have Barbies) - the whole point was dressing them up and making up the elaborate back story. The wedding never happened.
I did that myself, but we DID have the wedding. In fact, we had the most sordid, dramatic Barbie soap operas imaginable. We had car accidents, comas, infidelity, suicides, and all kinds of other awful scenarios. I’m not sure what my mother would have thought about that.
My kids - particularly my 5yo daughter - do both of those things. The second I’m OK with, but the first drives me batshit. WhyNot, what say we let the girls drive each other crazy and go get a cup of tea?
My girls still talk about how it took them so long to set up the story and the rules for playing with their toy horses that they never really had time to play with them. Every horse had to belong to a family, and every family had to have names. By the time everything got set up and all the horses were acquainted with all the other horses, it was bedtime.
We did this, too. Or rather, I did. My brother went through a phase of liking to “play” by just sitting there and watching me play with the dollhouse and describe some elaborate story to him. Something overly depressing always occurred: Daddy didn’t see Joey in the driveway and backed over him with the Playmobil RV, Mommy walked out on Daddy and Daddy coped by taking a headfirst dive off the roof, leaving the kids to fend for themselves, little Michael threw the baby down the stairs, the bank repo’ed various items, etc. I would have been maybe 7 or 8 and he was 5ish. You’d think I came from a broken home or was a budding sociopath or something, but no, I just really liked my versions of “House” to be cynical.
Kids are weird. Sometimes they have the attention span of gnats and other times they spend hours focusing on stuff that bores you to tears. Like the 4-year-old I knew who liked to set up battles between Ninja Turtles and every single freakin’ plastic animal in the whole toy bin (like 30 of them), one-on-one. He’d just bang them against each other and it would keep him occupied for a really long time. Fortunately he usually liked to do the banging himself and I could just keep an eye on him rather than having to join in the fight, but man, booooring.
** A lot** of kids, particularly oldests and onlies, are like this. I have fairly distinct memories of fighting with a friend who was also the oldest in her family because she would tell me what to have barbie say. I knew her when I was 8-9.
Maybe not the names, but as a boy, I well remember setting things up in the sandbox. We’d get our Matchbox cars and trucks and construction toys and similar, and build, grade, and so on; roads and towns and whatnot. Then, when it came time to actually play with our creation–it was dull and boring. The fun lay in the building and planning.
No game is as fun as the games my kids make up among themselves. They can be strange, even incomprehensible, but everybody gets to play and nobody’s hurt. Eventually, they’ll have 5 or 6 of the neighborhood kids all doing who-knows-what. They get loud, but that’s usually a large part of the fun. Shrieking, running, and dodging is what kids are made for. I’m thankful my kids do that rather than sit and stare at the TV for so long.
Thank heavens. I’ve become very concerned about how today’s kids use things like Legos. They follow the step-by-step instructions to make what it shows on the box, and once that’s done—well, that’s it. Time to go buy another $30 box with another picture on it.
If that’s weird, we need to take both of my brothers and both of my nephews to the nearest shrink, along with over half of my former classmates (those of us who weren’t “part of the group” were those who refused to follow Eva’s orders or accept that her team had to win because she owned the toys).
In my sibs and nephews’s case, it’s the youngest who’s bossiest, but The Nephew (older than his sister) is perfectly happy to order his classmates around… except for his BFF and rival, Marina, who bosses him and every other kid around. There’s bound to be some kids whose attitude to those orders is “brrrrrp”, but I just don’t know which ones.
As for setting things up, that was my role for The Bros. They’d call me and tell me “we want to play soldiers, set us up”, and I’d use some boxes, breadcrumbs and foil to create a beach, or boxes, a green cloth and less foil for a ford in a forest… and then they’d bring out their tiny soldier figures and play while I did my own stuff.
We realized a few years ago that the things we did in play are reflected in what we do for a living.
I am a Chemical Engineer working as an organization consultant; ever since before I got into consulting, I was already the person who’d set up new methodologies in the lab, document them, teach them to people… that is, the one who “set up the playing field” where others do their thing. Even more so nowadays, when I leave after setting it up.
Middlebro is a Mechanical Engineer and has worked as a construction foreman these last six years; he bosses people around a lot…
but gets bossed around by people like Littlebro: the ones holding the moneybags. He’s got a degree in Business Management and works as the controller (international) of an engineering company.
Sounds like your kids are on their way to good jobs
I’m pretty sure bossing everyone around is half the fun of pretending. I always find it funny to listen to my daughter and her little guy friend as they boss each other around the story.
My kids are about 7 and 10, and when they aren’t roughhousing with each other they are building elaborate worlds. It isn’t the living in their created worlds that is interesting; it is the creation and planning itself.
I think the “set-up is the play” is to be expected. Play is a way of learning how to be in the world…and learning how to understand connections, causation and cause-and effect is pretty darn important to success. Kids who are able to organize play in this way may be more able to be planfuly competent in the future, who knows.
Hell, you too? Although in my case, I got most of my ideas from watching soap operas with my mother. My cousin and I would come up with some really, really messed up stuff. My poor Barbies probably needed therapy!
My eldest daughter did this when she was young. Her younger sister was not so timid though and often told her to…Well let’s just say she didn’t appreciate being told how to play.
But my eldest would also scream at the dog, that he isn’t playing right, he’s messing up the pile or whatever.
I used to say this, too, but it’s easier to avoid as a parent now. With my son, you had to go to specialty stores to get “just plain Lego” - everything in the toy aisle was a themed kit. They had so many specialty pieces it really was a pain in the ass to make anything freestyle.
It cracks me up to hear the kids make up new games. Yesterday they were marching around playing follow the leader, but they seemed to run out of thing to do, so the one in front was just babbling nonsense while the younger one tried desperately to keep up with the string of gibberish and repeat it. They sounded like some kind of moving, tongue-speaking monstrosity.
I was a little bossy as a kid, but I wasn’t too bad.
For the second bit, I used to read D&D rule books over and over again and imagine some awesome fantasy world, but I would almost never actually play D&D. That seems pretty typical.
