User:Howard Chudacoff/Proposed/History of Childhood in the United States
Early in the nineteenth century, Catherine Elizabeth Havens, nine-year-old daughter of a New York merchant, wrote in her diary, “I don’t think grownup people understand what children like.” Catherine liked to play, to amuse herself in her own way, but it seemed to her that adults were always interfering (Havens quoted in Berger and Berger, 1966, p.219). Maria Kraus-Bolte, however, the nineteenth-century educator and founder of the kindergarten movement in the United States, expressed a different view, the kind of outlook that provoked Catherine’s complaint. “American children,” she declared, “must be taught how to play.” (emphasis hers) (Mergen, 1982, p.57) To Kraus-Bolte, play was too important to be left to children’s own designs; adult intervention was necessary. These two points of view represent a generational tension that has characterized the history of children’s play in the United States from colonial times to the present, a history characterized by change as well as continuity.
For over a century, experts have believed children’s play to be serious business, often identifying it not only as the one activity common to all children but also as essential to a variety of developmental qualities of physical, social, and emotional growth and maturity. Consequently, adults – parents, teachers, clergy, psychologists, and others – have consistently tried to direct children’s play toward what they, the adults, believed to be positive outcomes. But even the older generation has admitted that self-structured play can define the foremost joy of childhood, a means whereby, under the right conditions, youngsters independently learn and adapt through self-expression, risk-taking, and interaction. Play, as Johan Huizinga pointed out, is not ordinary; it is in many ways an expression of freedom (Huizinga, 1955, p. 8-9). And the quest for freedom, the longing for autonomy, has characterized children’s behavior throughout American history.
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The role of play in children’s lives
This essay will be less concerned with a formal definition of play than with its role in children’s lives and the contested definitions that arose between generations – the differences between Catherine Havens and Maria Kraus-Bolte (Chudacoff, 2007). Certainly play consists of amusing activities that provide behavioral, social, intellectual, and physical rewards. But also there is a particular non-obligatory quality of play best expressed when Mark Twain has Tom Sawyer explain near the beginning of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do (Twain, 1875, p. 33). Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” It is that non-obligatory quality, along with the expression of independence through play, that I think have given children’s own play culture its distinctive quality.
An examination of diaries and autobiographies as well as standard primary and secondary sources provides a focus on children of a certain age cohort, that of years six through twelve, the period that Freud labeled “latency” and that Erikson identified as characterized by a crisis of competency and transition from the world of home to the world of peers (Erikson, 1950, p.72). It is, and has been, a time in which gender and age structure a child’s life and a time in which play takes on special meaning in children’s lives.
Childhood as ages six to twelve
Any analysis of children’s play in American history – in fact, in all of human history – must take into account the reality that until very recently most youngsters in the age group six-to-twelve worked. Some may have been employed, but the great majority engaged in activities that contributed to the family economy by working in the fields, in the home, and in the streets. Moreover, variations have existed, not only across time periods but also according to categories such as region, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and, especially, gender. Nevertheless, all children also have played in similar ways, not just in a distinct “play time” but also on stolen times in which they intermingled games, songs, and other amusements into their labor. These common activities have occurred within four contexts: the play site; the materials (toys and playthings); the playmates (including solitary play); and the tension between self-constructed and adult-structured play. Though the environments, the things, the playmates, and the scale of freedom have changed over the course of American history, kids have always been kids: sometimes angelic, sometimes devilish, and always wondrous in the unexpected and creative ways they do things, especially the ways they play. And the ways that they have engaged in their own, self-structured play can be characterized by three themes: APPROPRIATION; INCORPORATION; TRANSFORMATION.
Though, unlike political or economic history, the history of play does not fall into neatly defined chronological periods, the societal context of American childhood and its relationship to play can be divided into five eras: the pre-modern period before 1800; the transformational period between about 1800 and 1850; the beginnings of a child-centered society of 1850-1900; the rise of a commercialized childhood between 1900 and 1950; and the modern era of a media-centered and adult structured childhood since 1950. In each period, uninvited intrusions of poverty, disease, injury, abuse, and bondage tempered the carefree existence of many children, and over time the adult impulse for protecting and enriching childhood resulted in ever-expanding management of children’s play time. Yet kids of all types in all places never abandon their search for autonomy, and a “dance of generations” survived social and economic shifts both inside and outside the family (Graff, 1995, p.11).
Play in Early America
High birthrates, high rates of mortality, and low life expectancy formed the context of childhood in pre-1800 America. Most colonies were tri-racial, consisting of free and indentured whites, enslaved Africans and African Americans, and native Indians. Most white families had numerous offspring, in part resulting from women’s early age at first marriage. Slave women also married formally and informally at young ages, and bore many children. Indians may have had somewhat lower birthrates than whites because native women tended to nurse longer, and numbers of Indian children may have been relatively smaller because Indians suffered high death rates from illness and white violence.
This demographic context affected children’s lives in several ways. High death rates meant that although young people might have lived in large families, they experienced loss of siblings as a fact of life. The death of a parent also was common, while remarriage of a widowed father could add step-siblings to a child’s household. Also, with numerous births occurring across a mother’s child-bearing years, generational boundaries blurred as older children often helped to rear younger siblings. Within black and white families, private life blended with public supervision, and children worked with adults in the household and in the fields. Obedience to parents, to God, and, for slave and indentured children, to masters and mistresses dictated youngsters’ behavior. Indian attitudes toward authority were less severe, allowing native children more independence.
Play on stolen time
Except in the wealthiest families, most children in American colonial society were contributors to the household economy, meaning that play, when it happened, often occurred on borrowed or stolen time. To the strictest adults, such as New England Puritans, pure play meant “idling,” a non-productive activity that occurred in “the devil’s workshop.” (Illick, 1992, p. 50) Yet, there was some recognition of orderly, functional play; that is, play that suited adult needs and interests for cultivating reverence and cooperation. Moreover, what might have appeared as idling to the older generation could mean true enjoyment to youngsters. “Rambling” in forests, swimming and fishing in ponds, sledding down hillsides, rolling hoops across meadows, and many more outdoor activities were common ways that children appropriated natural playsites for their own amusement. Slave children blended singing games and informal competitions into their labor, and Indian boys practiced hunting by appropriating trees and transforming them into targets. Indoors, children made up games and played with cards and dolls.
Playthings in these unstructured pastimes were mostly improvised. A few toys, often imported, such as dolls, doll furniture, miniatures, wagons, and puzzles could be found in wealthier households; but objects that children created or appropriated for themselves constituted the most common materials of play. Sticks carved into fishing poles and game pieces, dolls transformed from corn cobs, pieces of discarded wood incorporated into make forts and cabins, and household utensils became play implements. Samuel Goodrich, growing up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, recalled making constant use of his penknife as “a source of great amusement and even recreation” because he could fashion so many playthings with it (Goodrich, 1856, p. 92).
Play within the family
In this early period, play involved interaction with siblings and other family members more than with unrelated peers. There was not much consciousness about what types of play were appropriate for different age groups, and sometimes parents and children amused themselves by playing together. Games such as blindman’s bluff and find-the-bean, along with card games and puzzles could occupy an entire family, and joint activities such as reading and singing occurred as well. Invariably, play among children was sex-segregated, both by choice and by social prescription. Girls’ entertainment with dolls and miniature household items was intended to prepare them for skills they would need as women; boys hunted, raced, and roamed together in their male-only world.
The commonly acknowledged inferior status of children meant that adults accepted a basic responsibility to guide the young toward a moral and obedient adulthood, but children could and did engage in independent play, even when retribution loomed. New Englander John Barnard wrote that “I was beaten for my play, and my little roguish tricks,” but he indulged in such activity anyway (Barnard quoted in Axtell, 1974, p. 196). Whether roaming through woods, creating fantasies and games with self-fashioned playthings, or idling with others, young people managed to fashion their own play and to follow their own inclinations.
Play in the Early Nineteenth Century
Many of the factors that characterized the social context of American childhood before 1800 remained in place in the first half of the nineteenth century. Birth and death rates remained high, and the family’s need for children’s labor, both slave and free, restricted time for amusement. Yet, the expansion of market economies in preindustrial America effected changes that began to alter youngsters’ lives in important ways. As new labor patterns began to separate place of work from place of residence, the household became the sanctuary of women. Mothers assumed greater responsibilities for protecting children’s innocence, and school attendance, though not yet compulsory, increasingly occupied children’s daily lives. Slave children, trapped between the embrace of their biological family and the authority of their owners, still lived under difficult conditions. But in society at large, influences from the Enlightenment about the innocence and wholesomeness of children helped to spread new attitudes about the need for sheltering the young in ways that included a greater tolerance for play and toys.
Appropriation of the outdoors and of common objects
As they had done in previous generations, children continued to appropriate the home and incorporate the outdoors as their sites for self-amusement. New domestic architectural features such as attics, cellars, and, among families with means, children’s own bedrooms offered play spaces that were removed from parental monitoring. But more than household spaces, youngsters appropriated and transformed places beyond the home: barns, sheds, yards, fields, and woods, both for active entertainment and private reverie. Henry Wright, raised on the New York frontier, loved to roam the woods with his dog and “feel myself shrouded in forest darkness.” (Wright quoted in Jones, 1965, p. 107) Slave children also found enjoyment in nature. William Flannagan recalled that in his boyhood on a plantation in Simpson County, Mississippi, “All us had to amuse us wuz what us found in de woods, wid de trees, streams, an’ de hillsides.” (Flannagan quoted in Rawick, 1971, p. 733) As increasing numbers of youths grew up in cities, they incorporated new environments for play: stoops, sheds, docks, and stables.
Formal toys remained scarce, so children applied inventiveness to their play objects. Sometimes, they made facsimiles of conventional toys that their families could not afford: hoops, sleds, hobbyhorses, boats, and dolls fashioned from a wide variety of resources. Discarded home implements and clothing offered particular appeal. Jeannette Leonard Gilder, forced by family poverty to grow up in her aunt’s household New Jersey, found joy in appropriating such objects as a broken cookstove, an unused bureau, and a discarded doll. “These were my greatest treasures,” she announced, “because I could really use them.” (Gilder, 1900, p. 96) Mary Crosby recalled from her childhood in New York City, “My mother had preserved various bonnets of different fashions from the extremely large to the extremely small . . . these always created great amusement.” (Crosby quoted in Dargan and Zeitlin, 1990, p. 122)
Though some wealthier youngsters were herded into formal groupings such as literary societies and lyceums, the most accessible play partners remained siblings and cousins, and most play activities remained sex-segregated. Considerable evidence exists, mostly from the narratives collected from former slaves by the Works Progress Administration, that in the South white and black kids played together, at least up the age of ten or twelve.
Children as playful rather than sinful
Notions that children entered the world with innate wickedness were fading from their eighteenth-century prevalence, but adults were no less attentive to steering the younger generation away from idleness. And youngsters were, if anything, more intent on loosening the reins on their activities. An upsurge in prescriptive literature advised parents to guide their offspring into games and hobbies that cultivated “habits of order and arrangement.” Harvey Newcomb, a widely read author of advice manuals, allowed that there was “no more harm in the play of children than in the skipping of lambs.” Yet, he prescribed sixteen rules for play behavior and advocated that play promote “Christian duty.” (Newcomb, 1847, p. 10-11, 182-182) Such habits included mimicking adult activity in domestic and breadwinning functions. But alternatives, even defiance, were not far away, even when consequences might be unwelcome. Maine native Brown Thurston filled his journal with references to independent efforts at amusement: he attended the circus against his father’s wishes, escaped his aunt’s supervision to learn how to chew tobacco, and nearly drowned while playing with a friend on a homemade raft (Thurston). Future naturalist John Muir mused in reflection, “No punishment, however sure and severe, was of any avail against attractions of the fields and woods.” (Muir, 1913, p. 48) Risk and autonomy were as much a part of childhood as obedience and restraints.
By 1850, the playful rather than the sinful quality of childhood was winning acceptance, so that children’s self-structured play was receiving a more widespread stamp of approval – so long as such play respected adult prerogatives for controlling the younger generation. As production of goods moved increasingly out of the home, the domestic and outdoor environments offered more opportunities for play, and children like Jeanette Gilder, Brown Thurston, and John Muir were quick to seize them.
Play in the Late Nineteenth Century
Between 1850 and 1900, demographic and economic transitions altered American childhood. Birth rates dropped; place of work separated from place of residence; a consumer society emerged; a new middle-class arose; school attendance began to become compulsory, and age-based peer cultures became common. Professional experts in fields of education and psychology began urging intervention in children’s lives not only to ensure appropriate learning and character development but also to shield youngsters from supposedly harmful influences of urban-industrial society. Sheltering kids in schools and playgrounds became a widespread goal, reflecting both the experts’ protective motives and their lack of trust in parents’ abilities. Thus a New York reformer could declare, “That which parents do not or cannot control in the private sphere of the home, the city must control in the public spheres of park, playground, schools, and recreation centers.” (Frost and Woods, 1998, p. 232-233) More than before, happiness came to be accepted as a particular quality of childhood, with the result that healthy play as well as education and protection became desired goals. The availability of mass-produced toys, games, dolls, and books increased dramatically after the Civil War, transforming commercialized playthings from instruments of instruction to items to induce joy.
Play in the city
Play settings shifted as the urban built environment offered new sites and materiel. Nature still gave youngsters sites for “roaming,” and domestic spaces still could be appropriated for games and fantasies. But now, paved streets, better lighting, telephone poles, fire hydrants, and fences provided opportunities for playful inventiveness and incoproration. As editor and critic Henry Seidel Canby recalled, the yards and streets of his native Wilmington, Delaware, offered a “series of city states to play in,” and vacant lots could be transformed into a “true frontier . . . ” (Canby, 934, p. 35) Contemporary anthropologist Stewart Culin observed how city kids appropriated lamp-posts and trees for their invented games (Culin, 1891, p. 230).
The sheltered model of childhood
The sheltered-child model increasingly included commercial toys as a means of occupying time. In an appeal to parents as toy providers, manufacturers used bright colors and patriotic themes for games, tops, and miniature vehicles. In an age of fascination with technology, doll manufacturers fashioned their products with mechanical movements, though some female manufacturers such as Martha Jenks Chase of the M.J. Chase Doll Company created more realistic dolls that were soft and flexible. However, though children played with new dolls and achieved expanded mobility with newly-minted bicycles, they continued to improvise playthings from objects appropriated from nature, the household and the streets. John Albee, for example, used “all movable objects” as toys, including his mother’s knitting needles which, as a sword, could “slay a thousand foes at one stroke . . . .” (Albee, 1910, p. 42-43)
Children played in same-sex peer groups, now, usually defined by associations at school and in neighborhoods and that fomented peer-influenced socialization that widened the gulf between generations. Thus Ethel Spencer, raised in Pittsburgh in the late nineteenth century, observed that her adult relatives were less important to her childhood than were “friends of our own age with whom we played every day.” (Spencer quoted in Weber and Stearns, 1983, p. 58) Some girls expressed resentment at being excluded from play with boys; Californian Loretta Berner wrote later in her life that “At the age of nine, I was sorry I was a girl because [like boys] I too wanted to roam the world free as a bird.” (berner, 1970, p. 2) But most children seemed content to involve themselves with their own gender. In addition, however, the proliferation of items such as toy vehicles and paper dolls made playing alone appealing to many youngsters.
Eluding adult supervision
Like their predecessors, children of this era tried to express their autonomy by eluding adult supervision. Adults split on how whether and how much to tolerate this independent behavior. Some educators and psychologists subscribed to a view that children’s judgment was too undeveloped to allow leeway to what they did, while others cautioned that the “play instinct” was a healthy characteristic that should be cultivated by the child herself or himself. Psychologist T. R. Crosswell was one of several social scientists who undertook detailed study of unstructured play by preadolescents and concluded that such activity had beneficial effects. To the surprise of many, Crosswell discovered that these youngsters preferred games and toys that they created themselves to the playgrounds and toys created for them by adults. On their part, children use self-structured play to explore their environment and learn from others and from their own experiments. At times this behavior included risk-taking and misbehavior, especially among boys but occasionally among girls as well. Kids climbed trees, dove into ponds, grabbed free rides on streetcars, and played pranks, most of which was harmless or resulted in minor property damage or injury.
As the nineteenth century closed, adults exhibited increasing ambivalence about how much freedom children should have in their expanding unstructured time. Guidance toward productive behavior in a sheltered setting became more pervasive. But new attitudes reflected indulgence and appreciation for the skills and self-regulation that youngsters might accomplish when adults backed off from strict supervision. Moreover, the notion of fun as a entitlement acquired new credence. Never far removed, however, adults were poised to enter the child’s world in expanded ways after the new century began.
A Golden Age of Play?
The history of American children’s play in the early twentieth century is bounded by two important phenomena: the onset of child-saving during the Progressive Era just after 1900 and the appropriation of children’s culture by television in the mid-1950s. During this half century, adults made powerful incursions into play life, yet, paradoxically, children made successful assertions of play independence. Attitudes about the social roles of young people reflected a full flowering of the sheltered model of childhood, in which the state and its institutions, as well as parents, set apart children by age and channeled them toward a protected physical, intellectual, and emotional development. American society became more child-centered, removing children from work responsibilities, passing laws to make sure they attended and stayed in school, and giving them more time and opportunities for play. At the same time, professional child-study and child-saving promoted the idea that youngsters should not lose their ”play instinct.” Indulgence was not the result; adults believed that children’s activities needed to tailored to the demands of living in a consumer-oriented, technological society. Still, youngsters conspired alternative modes of action, using new freedoms and new playthings for their own purposes.
Rebelling against adult prescriptions
Heightened concern with protecting children from harmful influences resulted in imposed limitations on play sites. Playgrounds became the chief tool for removing kids from city streets, but children did not accept playgrounds with the enthusiasm that reformers expected. Surveys revealed that youngsters visited playgrounds once or twice, then, voting with their feet against unwanted supervision, returned to their informal and appropriated play environments. As one eleven-year old testified, “I can’t go to the playgrounds now. They get on my nerves with so many men and women around telling you what to do.” (Rosenzweig, 1983, p. 151) Similar rebellions occurred around the expanding toy box. A few toys became highly popular: scientific and construction toys for boys; realistic baby dolls and fashion-oriented paper dolls for girls. But instead of adopting these “educational” and preparation-for-adult playthings, youngsters frequently expressed greater desire for fantasy toys and dolls inspired by radio, comics, and movies involving characters such as Shirley Temple, Mickey Mouse, and Dick Tracy. Moreover, especially among youngsters from low-income households but also among those more advantaged, improvised playthings, more than commercial toys, absorbed play time. Thus humorist Sam Levenson, who grew up in an urban immigrant family, recalled, “ashcan covers were converted into Roman shields, oatmeal boxes into telephones, combs covered with tissue paper into kazoos . . . candlesticks into trumpets, orange crates into store counters . . .” and many more types of appropriation and transformation (Levenson, 1967, p. 83).
Sex segregated and peer playmates
In these years, sex-segregated play remained an especially prominent factor in the lives of pre-teens of all socioeconomic ranks. Boy culture flourished in an independent, alternative world where values of loyalty and competitiveness prevailed. Sports were especially predominant in their physical games and in board games. Girls, for their part, predictably took part in gender-prescribed activities, dressing up, playing with dolls, and engaging in singing games. But unstructured active play was also characteristic; riding bicycles, playing tag games, and skating were common for both girls and boys. The rhyming jump-rope game of double dutch, fostered among urban African American girls, was especially popular. Importantly, the independent, mutual play of peers among both boys and girls fortified the elements of a separate pre-teen children’s culture and widened the gap between generations.
As in previous eras, youngsters used unstructured play in their quest for autonomy. Steeped more than ever in peer culture and able to escape into a variety of environments at home and in their neighborhoods, children dodged adult control to a greater extent than those of previous generations. A bicycle, now common to many youngsters, brought a special kind of mobility and freedom. Samuel Hynes, who received a bike for his eleventh birthday, recalled, “On my bike I will ride . . . away from the security of my house and my block into unfamiliar streets beyond, to somewhere else. . . . I’ll be free to take a chance or a dare, to go where I’m forbidden to go, to get into trouble. On my bike I’m no longer a little kid; I’m a kid.” (Hynes, 2003, p. 74) Most of the time, they were “good,” but they could also be devious. Future Texas Congresswoman and African American feminist Barbara Jordan lived with strict grandparents but admitted that sometimes “I would sneak around – I mean literally sneak out” to play with friends (Jordan and Hearon, 1979, p. 122). Such behavior involved risks and misbehavior: petty thievery, swimming and skating on unsafe ponds, exploring storm sewers and abandoned buildings. Such secret activities formed a cherished part of modern childhood. As writer Robert Paul Smith reflected, “when we were kids, we had the sense to keep these things to ourselves. We didn’t go around asking grownups questions about them. They obviously didn’t know.” (Smith, 1957, p. 40-41)
There can be no doubt that events beyond their control intruded on children’s lives and affected their play. Two world wars sandwiched around extended years of economic hardship imposed limitations on the things and time that many children had available to them for play. Yet diaries, journals, and autobiographies of children who grew up in those times suggest that kids in all socioeconomic categories had just as much, perhaps even more, opportunity to just be kids than their counterparts of previous generations. Their independent play, combined with the expanded opportunities for appropriating playsites, enjoying the new cornucopia of commercial toys, and improvising games and playthings arguably made the first half of the twentieth century a golden age of play. This scene would soon change dramatically.
Commercialization and Co-optation of Children’s Play
The debut of The Mickey Mouse Club television show in 1955 was a landmark event not only because it was the first television show aimed directly at pre-adolescent children but also because one of its sponsors was the Mattel Toy Company. Previously, toy manufacturers advertised their products mainly at Christmas time if at all. Now, however, Mattel marketed its products – first a ping-pong-ball-shooting “burp gun” and later Barbie dolls and other classic playthings – every weekday. Moreover, by advertising on The Mickey Mouse Club, Mattel aimed its pitch directly at children, cultivating their demand for its products. Marketers were quick to see how they could capitalize on children as consumers. As one journalist observed in 1964, “Children have become a Market – often referred to as the ‘subteens’ by people who apparently see them mainly as avid little consumers.” (Brown, 1964, p. 17)
Children of the Baby Boom
Mattel and its counterparts knew what they was doing because in the two decades after World War II, a Baby Boom markedly increased the American population of youngsters, marching a huge generation of consumers into the marketplace. By 1960, there were more than 33 million Americans ages five to fourteen, an increase of 37 percent in ten years and constituting 18 percent of the nation’s total population. Some kids could afford more than others, but everywhere play became associated with toys. Numbers of pre-teens dropped somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s as the Baby Boom subsided, but by then a new factor affected children’s lives: mothers entered the workforce in increasing numbers. By 1999, 78 percent of mothers of kids ages six to thirteen were employed. The result was that at virtually all socioeconomic levels parental supervision of play diminished, replaced by adult-structured, out-of-the-home activities such as sports leagues, non-academic lessons, and youth clubs.
The protection and enrichment of children
Two goals – some would say obsessions – have thus characterized adult control of children’s play in the past several decades: protections and enrichment. Terrified by the polio epidemic of the early 1950s, parents kept offspring away from swimming pools, summer camps, and even from playmates. Subsequently, childcare experts and journalists fixated on protecting youngsters from every possible threat and hazard, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, created in 1972, increasingly focused on safeguarding children from “unsafe” playground equipment, toys, and clothing. Moreover, sensationalized media publicity of child deaths and abuse frightened parents into preventing activities such as unsupervised neighborhood play and even confining youngsters to the house where they could amuse themselves in front of a TV or computer screen. Beyond shielding children from a threatening outside world, many parents strove to equip their offspring for success in post-modern society. They wanted the younger generation to be better than average in all things and tried to provide them with professionally run out-of-school pursuits and materials that would expand their children’s minds, tone their bodies, develop physical skills, and enhance self-esteem.
These trends affected a major shift in the play environment. The disappearance of open space in cities, coupled with safety concerns in suburbs and cities, constricted the number of playsites for preteens to appropriate, often increasing indoor play even in good weather. Tightened adult control of play gave rise to indoor, air-conditioned “pay-for-play” sites and “child entertainment centers” for those who could afford the price of admission. Computer games and internet play also expanded the hours of indoor play. Aided by marketing directed at kids, toys and games became part of a larger complex that combined them with movies, TV programs, and books symbiotically. Such media phenomena as Harry Potter, “Transformers,” Spiderman, and Barbie spawned back stories that accompanied new toys. Youngsters from low-income families might not have been able to afford these toys – or at least not as many of them – yet manufacturers courted them with cheaper, knock-off versions.
New types of play groups
The shifting environment and new play activities have altered the composition of play groups. As residential areas – suburban neighborhoods as well as urban apartment complexes – became more impersonal, the importance of neighborhood “gangs” (units of playmates) diminished, replaced by more fluid assemblages. A nine-year-old now might be involved with one set of kids on a soccer team, another in an art class, and another on a school bus. Informal play is more likely to occur in a group of two or three rather than the choosing-up of sides for an impromptu game among eight or ten. As well, indoor, media-related play has increased time spent in solitary, sedentary play. As in the past, however, most play groups remain sex-segregated, especially in later pre-teen years. Though increasingly herded into structured activities, children still find ways to conspire independent ways of appropriating, incorporating, and transforming. When beyond watchful eyes, they sometimes take risks, testing physical abilities that may result in newfound confidence but also lead to skinned knees or bruises. Tree-climbing, balancing on a ledge, running up a slide instead of gliding down, playing games in prohibited areas, just “goofing around,” and many more acts of defiance continue to define children’s guerilla tactics for seizing their own play. Occasionally, more serious consequences occur, especially when youngsters get access to power tools, medications, or firearms. Parents and teachers thus face a quandary in determining how much supervision and risk aversion they should assume.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the swift and pervasive rise of electronic media dominated fantasy play and gave children of all socioeconomic statuses the contexts for much of their play. At the same time, however, adults leaned more toward control than toward freedom, intervening in children’s lives to structure their time away from school in adult-supervised activities, especially sports. While children of the present have had more influence over their own consumer choices than earlier generations of youngsters, adults now dictate children’s play activities more extensively than in the past. Some would say that they have appropriated it.
Conclusion
The history of children’s play in America features both change and continuity. Environments have shifted from the informal and natural to the formal and supervised. Toys have become ever more elaborate, especially as electrification and software have come to characterize many playthings. The composition of play groups was altered by the rising importance of peer groups. And adult-structured activity has diminished opportunities for free, unstructured play. Yet continuities persist. Kids still find ways to appropriate their own play sites, incorporate and transform a multitude of objects into playthings; and conspire ways to elude adult management. Most of all, they learn how to adapt through their play to two different worlds, the one created by adults and the one they inhabit by themselves. Author and critic William Dean Howells perhaps said it best when recollecting his childhood in small-town Ohio in the 1840s. In one part of that childhood, Howells earnestly engaged with his parents, sharing with them his “world of foolish dreams.” But he also played in another half, in which he “swam and fished, and hunted, and ran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffled in the Boy’s Town.” (Howells, 1890, p. 177) More recently, Kate Simon, daughter of immigrant parents living in New York City, recalled how she climbed and fell off ledges but never told her parents, and her confession in her autobiography illuminates much about children’s culture when she wrote, “I was . . . practiced in the hypocrisies of being a good girl.” (Simon, 1982, p. 4-5).
That ability to find fun in a “town” of boys or girls, exclusive of adults, that talent for appropriating, incorporating, and transforming something as ordinary as a television set, is and has been what is wondrous about children’s play.
References
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