Children’s play is very revealing. I knew all about this before I became a mother. In fact, I am a sociologist with an area of expertise in “The Sociology of Children and Childhood.” As strange as this is, there are people in this country who actually consider me an expert on that. I’ve done studies on how to elicit children’s perceptions through social research. I’ve written on methodologies for understanding the inner lives of children. Anyone who has read any of this work, or heard me speak on these subjects at conferences, will tell you that I am a huge proponent of using children’s play and children’s artwork in social research. My argument has always been simple: children’s play and artwork reveals their life-world, so use it as a child-friendly approach to studying children’s lives. Yup. Sounds good. Makes sense. I’m also a feminist sociologist. People who know my work and teaching know this about me. So, of course it just logical that I would be the first to say that we as a society should do more to encourage young boys to play with dolls and foster boys’ nurturing/care-taking play. Yup. Sounds good. Makes sense.
Everything intellectual takes on new on-the-ground meaning when you become a parent. Recently K & O’s play has leaped into a whole new imaginatory dimension. They suddenly are not playing like babies anymore and are doing what kids do with toys: they are using them to “play” out real life, using them to “process” their experiences, using them to “work through” their observations. It is revealing. That’s for sure. It is cute too, definately. And… sometimes it is really, really embarassing, as the parent.
The latest is that the boys play for long stretches of time with their dolls. They first start by taking them for walks in their toy stroller. This is very brief. They then move on to “diapers change!”/”change diapers!” — and they lay the dolls down on the floor to “clean up the BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG poop! whoa dude! Biiiiiiiiiiig poopie in there! Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiig load!!!” (this, again, is very brief: they use a piece of a baby-wipe to quickly “clean” the babies’ bums). What’s next takes up the large bulk of the doll play. It is not brief, and is repeated over and over and over, sometimes for very long stretches of time: The dolls get “TIME OUT!” Big proclaimations are made, the play becomes very rambunctious, the boys get extremely animated. They announce what it is that the babies did to warrant the time outs: “That baby HIT me!!!!” “That baby BITE me!!!” “No baby! No baby! No hitting baby! No biting baby! TIME OUT BABY! Sit!!!!!” The babies have to sit on the stairs for time out — just like K & O do — and sometimes the poor babies sit there for a loooooooooong time before getting rescued with hugs and kisses and pats on the back and “it’s o.k. baby”‘s from K & O. [Just to be clear, in point of fact: K & O get 2 minute time outs –timed down to the second– when they get them in real life.] The other day, amidst all this doll play, they must have forgotten that their babies were in time out (surely K & O just found something else to do that was way more interesting at the moment — like rolling trucks across the floor making very loud noises and talking about motors, or detroying something that is supposed to be “off limits,” or pulling the cat’s tail — and then lost track of their babies’ discipline). I was quickly going to run upstairs to grab something and found this (see photo).