Patterns, (My Little) Ponies and Play

There’s a little piece up on Boing Boing mentioning a story related in Sherry Turkle’s book Falling for Science. In it a contributor discusses her mathematical play with her My Little Pony.

“I had several small plastic Ponies that I used to play make-believe with my friends. But I had one larger, plush My Little Pony, a bright-green stuffed horse with a vivid pink mane and tail that I played with all by myself. I would sit for hours on my own, braiding and rebraiding its tail. I developed a system for braiding the tail of my Pony that taught me about mathematical concepts– from division to recursion.”

The title of this post is “How My Little Pony Turned a Little Girl into a Computer Scientist” and, while not explicitly addressed, the core point hinges on the seeming-incongruity of a girlish toy and science.  Arguments are made in the comments against the title, suggesting that some people are naturally inclined to see mathematical patterns in all aspects of their world and that the My Little Pony was only involved by chance, or posing the alternative title of “Area Girl becomes Computer Scientist despite playing with My Little Pony”.

I’ve posted previously on the differences in even science-focused toys that are marketed to girls, but what I think is really interesting is how adults interpret the ways in which children play with the toys they are given.  When we see a ‘girlish’ toy, such as a My Little Pony, we assume that the child playing with it is grooming it, petting it, etc.  We assume that a child’s play with a toy carries the same ideas about its use and possibilities that we have, in spite of everything we know about how the cardboard box it came in can be turned into a rocket ship. 

It is true that some toys, particularly those clever-looking plastic ones that have so many bells and whistles, provide a limited range of play opportunities.  They are specific in what they offer, but in spite of that specificity children can still excel in creative appropriation of their toys through play.  They can still surprise us.

The time that this one Computer Scientist was allowed to spend playing in her own way led directly to her understanding of complex mathematical concepts – and to her ability to identify them elsewhere in her world (such as in her cauliflower that evening).  However, for most adults watching her during this play she would have appeared to have been simply braiding the pony’s hair, grooming it in a completely familiar, if mildly obsessive, way.  No one who hadn’t asked her would have known what was going on in her mind and, even if they had, she might have found it very difficult to explain.

“The only eight year old anywhere…”

I recently had the pleasure of helping a girl build a chair.

It was made from the off-cuts of a larger project and required every skill in hammering, sawing and envisioning that she had acquired over recent weeks, and at the end was about the size and shape of an old-fashioned sleigh.

During the process the girl maintained a near-constant monologue, supported only by my occasional noises of agreement.

“Do you think I’m the only eight year old anywhere who’s built their own furniture?  I want to be a carpenter.  Maybe I could do that for work experience.  What did you do for work experience?  Do you think my Mum will like this chair?  Will I be able to keep it in the house?  She might say it’s clutter.  I could take it to Dad’s house.  Do you think he’ll like it?  It’s very heavy.  It’s good, isn’t it?  I could paint it this colour – I mixed it.  Do you know how?  With pink and purple and white.  I’m good at purple.  It’s the colour of my room.  I went to the shop with my Mum and they mixed it up with those shots of colour and a big thing that went whirr.  This is the best colour.  I can’t paint the whole chair – how would I carry it?  I’ll just paint the top.  Lots of paint.  All the lines going this way.”

I helped with some sawing (“Oh, you’re very quick”) and hammering after a bit of wood split and we had to use seasoned 2 x 4 instead of those shingley bits we’d originally collected.  We were running out of wood and time so it got a bit ‘bang-it-all-together’ at the end, but strangely it didn’t feel rushed.  It was as if there was lots to do in very little time, but no need at all to hurry.  It was like watching someone conduct an orchestra.

It was the passing of play-time, in one direction but drawing on the whole world’s sources.  It was the sensation of ‘flow’, and a perfect immersion in play and the creative process.

Do as I say, not as I do

There’s been so many articles on children and video games over the past few years it’s difficult to know what to link to.  I’m sure that this summer there will be another spate of op-ed pieces filled with nostalgic yearnings for games of stickball or kickabout in empty residential streets – and that’s great.  Anything that gets people talking about children’s rights to play and to use the outdoor spaces of their neighborhoods, is fine with me.  The thing is though, the evidence coming in has been contradictory.  One study suggests that “video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society” while another blames them for the “one child in six (that) has difficulty learning to talk” – while still managing to point a damning finger at busy parents and high property prices.  Elsewhere, Richard Louv and many others have drawn links between the current (Western) children’s ‘indoor culture’ of childhood and: obesity, ADHD, depression, social disaffection, poor communication, poor creativity, apathy, sociopathy, and spontaneously turning blue.

Okay, so that was just to see if you were paying attention.  The thing is, I want to agree with them.  I have met children who have never felt soil before, who say “don’t sit on the grass, there’s dirt under there”, who have never shelled a pea or seen a piece of fruit still on the tree, and felt my heart break.  It seems logical that such a massive change in children’s lives should have commensurately vast consequences, and I am pessimistic enough to be tempted by the widely popularized notion that everything, everywhere, is getting worse.  It is play that changes my mind.

In playwork, we cultivate a trust in children.  We believe that children know, on a deep level that some call intuitive or instinctive, what kind of play they need.  We believe that it is our job to support it, provide assistance when asked and advocacy all the time, and to bring new opportunities into the space so that children’s choices, and their play, is informed by the great possibilities of their worlds.  For some of the children mentioned above, that involved answering their questions about the tiny park they had just entered, and picking up a caterpillar to demonstrate it was not threatening.  But when those children left, I am certain that they went to play video games.  What does that say about children’s choices, about priorities and play?

Choice is a complex issue, and for all the children not allowed to go outside there are many too who have no desire to, who believe the natural world to be distant, dangerous or unappealing.  Considering where many children grow up, they may be entirely correct.  When you talk to children about video games, or facebook or whatever else they are clicking around online, it’s clear that these are complex worlds, with attendant systems of material and social status, that they are experts at navigating.  They are playing these new technologies with skill and enthusiasm, and in so doing inadvertantly preparing for lives exactly like ours.

I think that’s what’s so scary.  Like many people today, I spend the majority of my waking life on the computer.  I use it to work, relax and socialize.  If it is a drug, I am addicted.  I have bleary eyes, a complaining lower back and a deep sense of annoyance that I’m not hanging upside-down from a tree.  In fact I sometimes pretend to myself that I’ll go outside in a minute, once I’ve sent this email, checked that blog – and then I see that it’s dark.  I agree that too many children today are living unhealthy lives spent indoors eating junk food and worrying about worrying, but so are too many of their parents.  I think that’s why we’re so worried about them, we want better for them than we are willing to accept for ourselves.

Each child contains a wilderness that needs time and space to flourish – but do does every adult, even if it is buried somewhere deep.  Time among the trees, under the stars and around a campfire sustains a deep and vital part of our humanity, and when we have time to explore the wildernesses inside and outside of ourselves we have resources we can draw upon for the rest of our lives.  So when we’re making our litanies of complaints, saying that indoors and online is no way to spend precious days, we should seriously consider taking our own advice and kicking the kids, and ourselves, out until dark.

Gender and Play Clothes

The last time I ventured into the baby section of a clothing store I was looking for something for a friend’s new baby.  Something plain, I thought, maybe a 3-pack of onesies that I could stencil something onto.  Apparently those don’t exist anymore.  Instead, I found a shop divided decisively into a pink side and a blue side, into tiaras and t-shirts, tutus and tractors.  Boys got pictures of dinosaurs and builders, girls got bedazzled shoulders and cutesy slogans.  When it comes to children, their clothes are gendered, as are their toys, as are expectations of who they will be and become.

The toy industry magazine Play Things poses an interesting question: If underwear sections in a Chinese department store aren’t gender-specific, why are our toy stores?  The thing is, we don’t have to travel very far to be reminded that there’s a different way of doing things.

Below is a print ad run by Lego, taken from Sociological Images.  It’s not just the burnt orange and brown colour palette that makes me nostalgic for my own days of lego – it’s the denim dungarees,  practical braids and turn-ups.  It’s the idea of PLAY CLOTHES.

Where did that idea go?  That children need a wardrobe of clothes that it’s okay to get messy, outfits that say “what I am about to do is more important than looking cute”.

Now, I love dinosaurs, tutus, tractors and tiaras but I think they ought to be voluntary and open to all genders to pick them up, wear them in odd combinations or ignore them as desired.  Instead, the situation we are now putting children into is one in which everything is thoroughly and aggressively gendered.  The professions they are offered for imaginative play are a) less inventive than those they would come up with on their own and b) strictly limited by gender.  Every object is placed along a binary line from girlness to boyness – and increasingly the argument is being made for those distinctions as natural, innate and inescapable.

The gendering and segregation of merchandise is complicated and adaptive, and requires us to educate ourselves about our purchasing habits.  It may seem bad business to separate off half of the population from half of the merchandise, but one of the consequences of being told “all of these things are for boys” can make a boy, or the person shopping for him, think that all “these things” are necessary.  Think about how this plays out with adults – the aggressive distinctions in how skin care products are marketed to men and women encourages both groups to buy it, and to buy lots of it.  By being told “it’s okay for you to have this” marketers are telling you that a) your gender presentation requires constant work to maintain and b) the products you purchase and display can perform or destroy the maintenance work you do.

But because we know this on some level, and because many of us shopping for toys have been frustrated at the selection, accommodations are made.  A girl can aspire to be a doctor, so long as she wants to look hot while she’s doing it.  Toy microscopes are available in black and in pink, but the pink one is less powerful.  Now, I’ve taken these links from the website Sociological Images, but have found the same thing in any toy shop or catalogue I have dared peek into.  I’m going to reference Images again here, for a great post on the fractal nature of the binary, which explains how you can have things which appear to subvert this gender policing, but actually don’t.  I can’t help the linking love – it’s so rare to find a website I believe is a genuine resource to humanity!

The thing is most children are, at some point, already preoccupied by gender.  It’s wildly important to them at different stages, as they work out how they fit into the world and how to define themselves within and against it.  All of the elements of their lives, what they wear and what they play with, now combine to give them a very specific sense of who they are and what they can be – while telling them that it’s more important how they look than what they’re doing.