The Place In The Grove Presents

Play is a Child’s Work

Children need many varied experiences in order to discover the joy of learning and to develop what interests them. The goal is to turn them into life-long learners. Children begin to develop thinking skills by making little decisions based on what is most fun. They develop social skills by playing with other children. Children need opportunities for different types of play. It is part of a parent’s job to provide structured, supervised play. Children naturally look for ways to have fun. Pleasure is what motivates them. The way to get children to do what you call ‘work” is to make it fun. Picking up toys is work, but if you turn it into a beat the clock activity for children, they will find this fun and are likely to do the job much faster.

Wanting More Pleasure Than Pain

Everyone is designed to want more pleasure than pain. Stroke and slap arm. Pain is part of life but it is our nature to try our best to avoid it. Think about how you have organized your life so that your needs are regularly met. When you ask a child why they did something they usually will answer I don’t know. They aren’t going to say I did it because it was fun. Though that is exactly why they did it. Children are highly tuned in to what gives them pleasure, and many of us were raised with the idea that doing something just for fun is somehow mildly sinful.

Children Think In “The Now”

Adults in our culture measure time in very sophisticated ways. We order our lives by the clock. We think about the past and project into the future. Children, however, think about time differently. They think in the moment. A day in the life of a young child is like a week to an adult, and a week is like a month. Because children have so much to learn, their days are continuously filled with new things.

Young children have had very little past to use as a reference, and do not understand the future. Everything for them is immediate. \young children want what they want right now. They are not able, without training, to delay immediate gratification.

Often a child’s orientation toward the present clashes with a parent’s orientation toward the future. Most children do not understand the connection between doing well in school today and living a more satisfying life later.

Black and White Thinking

Children also think primarily in black and white until puberty. Everything is either right or wrong, you or me, this or that. They do not understand shades of gray or maybe. We call this concrete or literal thinking. It is a polarized view of the world that we all started out with as children. It is important to help children gradually grow out of this thinking into more expansive abstract thinking.

Magical Thinking

Children also engage in magical thinking and experience themselves as quite powerful. Children under five are egocentric and can only relate to external events as having to do with them or as being caused by them. They believe that they are responsible for what happens to others. They may believe that their wishes, thoughts and feelings actually make things happen.

If there is an accident or someone dies, they may not be able to understand