Just Playing

"They're just playing."

It's the phrase adults go to when a child spends twenty minutes talking to a stuffed animal, or drags a blanket through the house pretending it's a river. We say it like a reassurance. Nothing important is happening. They'll come back to real life in a minute.

The Work of Childhood

Like many children, my daughters have tons of stuffed animals. Most of the time when they're playing, a particular toy is someone's baby, and that baby has a name. The name sticks from day to day, not something invented fresh each time.

They also come back from the yard with sticks that aren't sticks. The sticks are wands, because at some point in the afternoon they've decided to become witches, and the wands have their own rules about what they can and can't do.

And at least once a week, a blanket becomes a royal cape.

Each time, an ordinary object is given a new identity, and the child then acts as if that identity is real: the stuffy who needs its mommy, the stick with powers, the blanket that confers royalty. The kids aren't confused about any of this. They know what a stuffy is and that the stick came from outside. They've simply decided that something else is also true, and they're going to live inside that decision for a while.

Symbolic Play

Dorothy and Jerome Singer spent more than forty years at Yale studying imaginative play. In a 2013 interview, Dorothy gave one of the plainest descriptions I've read of a child doing pretend play: "She's playing a game, and by taking a piece of mud and pretending that it's a birthday cake and putting candles on it, she's using her imagination... she knows that this is mud she's playing with, but it becomes the cake."^[1]

The child isn't fooled and isn't pretending to herself that mud is cake; she knows exactly what substance is in her hands. What she's decided is that a second thing is also true about it, and she's going to hold both of those meanings in her head while she plays. That isn't a trivial operation. It's the same cognitive move that grows up, eventually, into abstraction: any form of thought that requires treating one thing as if it were another.

Dorothy also pointed out how far kids will stretch to make substitutions work: "If a child doesn't have the object she wants, she can make something else be that object; for example, if she doesn't have a horse, she can make believe the broom is her horse."^[1]

These kids aren't getting the symbol wrong. They're building it on purpose. Seen that way, "just playing" starts to sound like what it is: a translation error.

Naming

If you watch closely, something else is happening underneath the substitution. The stuffy isn't just any stuffy; he has a name, the same one every day, and he has preferences about where he sleeps and who gets to carry him. The stick that becomes a wand isn't one of a class of wands; it's this wand, with rules about what it does, and if her sister picks up the wrong one there is a small incident. The naming isn't a label. It's what turns an object into a being.

Repeat that move often enough and something bigger starts to take shape. My daughters each have their own pretend houses: a rainbow house and a pink house, next door to each other, up in the sky somewhere. Around both houses are trees in every color that real trees don't come in. A different family lives there, a different mom and a different dad, siblings who are somehow the same as my daughters and also not. The houses persist from one day to the next. One afternoon they were created; the next morning (and every morning), they're still there.

What starts as naming a stuffy ends with building a sky. The same small act, repeated and sustained and cared for, turns a stuffed animal into a character with preferences, a stick into an instrument with rules, a stretch of imagined air into a two-house world with its own family and its own colors of tree. The naming is the move that breathes life into whatever the child is looking at, and when she has been practicing it long enough, what accumulates is a whole world that belongs to her the way the real one doesn't.

The capacity to hold that world steady, with rules and characters and continuity, is the same capacity that later shows up as abstract thinking. It's the move a writer uses when she carries a fictional character's logic in her head for a year at a time, and the one a scientist uses when she treats a model as if it were the system it represents. It's also what any of us does when we plan for something that hasn't happened. The habit of treating one thing as if it were another starts young, and the children who build those worlds in the living room are practicing a skill that will be in their hands for the rest of their lives.

Taking It Seriously

What changes, if you take this seriously, is small. You use the stuffy's name. You don't correct the scene when the blanket is a cape and the couch is a mountain. You take the world the child is building as seriously as she does, because for the purposes of what her mind is doing in that moment, the world is real.

The other day, one of my daughters finished a slice of apple pie, looked up, and said, "I have this at my rainbow house." She said it the way an adult might mention having a photo saved somewhere. The pie was now in the collection of good things she keeps up above the clouds, in a house she has quietly and magically grown on her own.