Through the Prism: There Could Be Mobs Just Around the Corner

Or, Pretending Is an Essential Language of Childhood

A recent exchange with my five-year-old:

"Can you unlock my Kindle?"

"Only after you put your shoes in the closet instead of the middle of the hallway."

"Dad, you asshole! . . . What does 'asshole' mean?"

A few posts ago I wrote about having a yearning to revisit the Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos from the Dungeons & Dragons of my youth. They were the source of many of my most fertile and involved imagined narratives. When I was younger I played with Fisher Price people and vehicles, animals and buildings, with Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars and their tracks, and with many other toys, and I know as I moved them around the house I was telling myself stories about those characters and what they were doing. As I got older I transitioned into Star Wars figures and Legos and similar, even Smurf figures among them. They were never just pieces of plastic and metal, because they representing the tales I spun about them in my head. Then my imagination soared to whole new levels once I discovered fantasy novels and D&D as a young teen.

I remember most vividly walking my paper route in, I think, 7th-9th grades. It was a small, local, afternoon paper that I delivered each day after school. I'd pick up my allotment to carry in bags that hung over my shoulders, then head toward my portion of our small town. It took nearly an hour start to finish as I went up to the house of each subscriber on the route and dropped a paper behind their screen door. An hour can be a long time for someone young and eager for play and diversions, yet I was rarely bored. I generally spent the time deep in my head, getting lost in stories about D&D characters. I would start by reliving gaming sessions and tales already created around the table with my friends, then launch into all kinds of adventures and detailed lives for those characters, until, as often as not, they ended powerful, wealthy, legendary, and elderly. When that didn't provide enough source material, I would create whole new scenarios to develop based on game resources I was reading that we hadn't yet used. Countless worlds were imagined and epic lives lived inside my head, with that game and those books providing the scaffolding, as I walked each day dropping newspapers behind doors in that humdrum Kansas town.

We've always had the goal as parents of limiting the amount of screen time our kids get. We've had modest success, but there has been much more than we expected. It came mostly in the form of TV until the past year or so. When the now seven-year-old started Kindergarten 18 months ago he was assigned an iPad for school. Then last March the pandemic hit and remote learning began. Both boys brought home iPads, plus we bought them Kindles we hoped to use for our own lessons and material. It didn't take long for them to find ways to access games, YouTube, and similar on those devices, and ever since they've had whole new worlds of material to feed their imaginations.

We have a drop-in childcare business we use during work hours when school is out and we have no other arrangements. Sometime recently the boys were allowed a bit of the game Minecraft while there. They fell deeply in love. They were most excited about the winter holiday break because it meant they'd get to go back and have another hour to play each day they were there. After two days, though, the facility had a Covid exposure and they had to close for the remainder of the break. We were suddenly stuck with them at home, my wife and I juggling supervision and missing partial days of work for over a week. While home, we left the boys to their own devices much of the time, which meant hours and hours on their devices--iPads, Kindles, and TV with Roku.

An obsession with Minecraft developed. Unable to actually play the game at home, they downloaded games as similar as they could find and they watched countless tutorial videos to learn more about the game's world and how to play. The first day back at school, the older one brought a Minecraft book back from the school library. He's found Minecraft audiobooks to listen to through the school software. They've only actually played the game for an hour or two at most, yet they now know a tremendous amount about it, and it fuels their imaginations more than anything else. It is the scaffolding for their imagined adventures and stories, providing the setting and tools for their mutual play and internal narratives, Older in particular. It is the current source of his mental magic.

Last night he convinced my wife and me to start taking dictation for the Minecraft book he has written in his head. Here is what we've had time to write so far.

How to Play Minecraft
As told by Older Child to his mother and his father.

Chapter 1: The Spawn

When I first spawned into Minecraft I had a lot of rewards to get. I had to dig into the ground. I had to mine. I had to get wood. Thing thing I wanted to do the most is make a bed, so I would be safe from the mobs at night. I went down block by block: one block, two blocks, three blocks. Eventually, I hit a cave system. Boy, was I scared! There could be mobs just around the corner.

Chapter 2: The Cave System

I stepped into the cave, shivering. I had no armor, I had no pickaxe, I didn't even have a sword to defend myself from mobs. I walked through the cave system nervously. Then I found some coal and mined it. Then I turned around an saw an enderman staring down at me and I ran away as fast as I could.

Soon I found myself on the prize-winning diamonds. Then I turned the corner and saw a creeper and then I ran as fast as I could. It exploded, but I was far away when it exploded. Then I found what I needed: iron. Good job for me!

Then I dug up block by block. I reached the surface in no time because I was only thirty blocks under the ground.

Chapter 3: Being Safe at Home

Then I got some wood planks. I used those wood planks to make a crafting table. Then I used that crafting table to make a furnace. I used that furnace and the coal I had mined to smelt the metal and make it into iron ingots. Then I used my crafting table to make the ingots into shears.

Then I used the shears to get some wool from a sheep. Fact: if you kill a sheep it will not be nice and only give you one piece of wool; if you use shears, which are large scissors, they will be nice because you didn't kill them and give you three pieces of wool--which is what you need to make a bed.

Then I used the wood planks, wool, and crafting table and made a bed.

Now I'm going to have to get into creative mode, so excuse me for a second. I've got about two stacks of bricks. Now I'm building my house. One brick, two bricks, three bricks, four bricks, five bricks, six bricks, seven bricks, eight bricks, nine bricks, ten bricks . . . one hundred bricks! Now I'm going to move my bed and my furnace. Krck! Krck! Krck! Alright, there goes my furnace. Krck! Krck! Krck! There goes my bed. Krck! Krck! Krck! There goes my work table. Alright, now let's go into my house. Let's place down my bed. Now let's place down my furnace. Alright, now let's place down my work table. Now, let's go to sleep. I'm tired. The mobs are going to be coming out soon.

Chapter 4: Villagers

Today I'm going to go find some villagers to trade some of my emeralds with. A sword or a pickaxe would be really helpful right now. So let's go find some villagers.

I'm walking . . . walking . . . there's some cows. I'm going to kill one or two--I'm starting to get a little hungry. I took out two cows. Now let's eat some. Nom nom nom nom nom. There we go, all my hunger is filled.

Oh, look, I found a village. There's sure to be some villagers there. Here we go. I found one that will trade me diamond armor for an emerald. Oh, here's another one who will give me a diamond sword for an emerald. Alright, that's plenty. I've spent the two emeralds I found in that cave. I'm going home. Thank you, villagers!

Chapter 5: The Night Fight

It's nighttime right now and I'm getting a little lonely. I want to get a dog and cat to keep me company. I think I am going to go and fight a skeleton to get me a bone for a dog and two spiders to get string to go fishing to get a fish for a cat. I've got my diamond armor and diamond sword from the villagers. I'm as ready as a tiger taking on a flea. Oh, a skeleton just hit me with an arrow! I've hit him with my sword. He lost nine hearts and I lost three. I won and got a bone.

Now I have to fight two spiders. It may be difficult, but I can do it. Oh, I hit one! I lost a few hearts. I hit the other one and lost more hearts when he hit me. I hit it again and won with only half a heart left. That was quite a fun fight! Now I better head to the house for rest. See you in the morning.

Chapter 6: The Search

Alright, I'm going to make a fishing line now. I've got some string. I've got some sticks. Now, let's see . . . three sticks diagonally . . . now I'm putting two strings down and I've got my fishing line. Now let's go and get some fish.

Waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . yes, I caught something! Yes, it was a fish! Alright, now let's catch another one in case I mess something up. Alright, caught another one. Let's go get a cat. I might get two since I caught two fish.

Now, alright, let's see. I think the best place to find a cat would be the jungle. I'm heading for the jungle. . . .

[To be continued]

He's always been tactile, active, and physical, a fidgeter who cannot sit still, and he paces with excitement while he talks, lost in his head, waiting impatiently for us to keep up with the words spilling out of his mouth. It's fascinating to observe and be part of, and I'm delighted by his imaginative and narrative skills.

Last night during bedtime, after asking about the day's events and how laws are made, Older said, "I want to be a lot of things when I grow up. I want to be a train driver and a Lego designer and a president and a toymaker and a lot of things." He didn't mention author, but you never know. President was the new one to the list. More on that later.

Tonight after work/school my wife went to bed with a headache and I needed to run errands. Younger wanted company so he agreed to go with me; Older wanted to stay home and look after himself. Upon our return, Younger and I found a dark house and realized we'd forgotten to turn lights on before leaving and no one had changed that. We entered the house and found Older hiding in a closet, composing "spooky" music with a app on his iPad.

And this came home in his backpack today. He had a surprising interpretation of the holiday break.

The best thing I ate: nothing (being uncovered on a platter).

One thing I want to do next year: is do hard math.

The most fun thing I did: was get cat socks.

People I got to spend time with: Brother, Dad, Mom.

He's an interesting character.

The rest of this post will be a wide variety of ideas related to the story above and, as I've been hoping to capture a bit of the pandemic experience in my posts since March, current events.

Those are screen grabs of part of a handout and a PowerPoint slide I've made for my storytimes at the library, sharing tips for parents and caregivers for how they can help their little ones develop the narrative skills that will make them better readers.

Tell Stories About Everything

Children need to understand that stories have a beginning, middle, and ending before formal reading instruction begins. The ability to describe things and events in sequence and to develop stories is referred to as narrative skills, and is critical in comprehension when learning to read.

Use dialogic reading—creating dialogue about the story—by asking open-ended questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” response. Encourage your child to predict what might happen next.

Plan your day by talking about what you’ll do first, next, and last. At bedtime, work together to tell the story of your day. Sometimes it helps memory to go backwards: “What did we do before bedtime? And what did we do before that? And before that?”

Encourage children to narrate their imaginative play: to tell stories about what their toys are doing; to give puppet shows; to draw pictures and then describe what is happening in the pictures. Playing is storytelling.

It's one of six essential early literacy skills and a key one for learning in general.

I just took a look back at my previous posts and was surprised to find I never included anything about The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups by Erika Christakis when I read it. Here's part of what I wrote about it at Goodreads:

Christakis begins with a very simple premise: that, for preschoolers, schooling and learning are often two different things. That young children are much more powerful and capable than we often give them credit for, that they primarily learn through relationships and play, and that the educational push to make their school experience more focused on "academic readiness" runs counter to their natural inclinations for learning.

I loved the book (5 of 5 stars), and captured many quotes from it. Here are a few:

Child’s play . . . falls into a huge category of supposedly natural behavior that is actually quite hard to accomplish without intention and assistance.

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Playing grocery store is actually better for brain development than a math work sheet with cartoon shopping carts? It has to be some kind of trick. Yet after decades of research, the benefits of play are so thoroughgoing, so dispositive, so well described that the only remaining question is how so many sensible adults sat by and allowed the building blocks of development to become so diminished.

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Early learning is fundamentally social in nature.

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Pretending is an essential language of childhood.

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Young children are important because they contain within themselves the ingredients for learning, in any place and at any time. Parents and teachers are important, too. And that’s because they still control the one early learning environment that trumps all the others: the relationship with the growing child.

And I don't think any of that changes as they get older and learn to read.

I pondered a plethora of similar ideas eight years ago in Imagination: Not Just for Kids (one of my more intriguing posts, I think). I'll pull out some excerpts, starting with this bit from The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks about a father trying to join his son and his friends in their play:

Over the course of his adult life, Rob had trained his mind to excel at a certain sort of thinking. This is the kind that psychologist Jerome Brunner has called "paradigmatic thinking." This mode of thought is structured by logic and analysis. It's the language of a legal brief, a business memo, or an academic essay. It consists of stepping back from a situation to organize facts, to deduce general principles, and to ask questions.

But the game Harold and his buddies were playing relied on a different way of thinking, what Bruner calls the "narrative mode." Harold and his buddies had now become a team of farmers on a ranch. They just started doing things on it--riding, roping, building, and playing. As their stories grew and evolved, it became clear what made sense and what didn't make sense within the line of the story. . . .

Rob was like a warthog in a frolic of gazelles. Their imaginations danced while his plodded. They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal. After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head. He was exhausted trying to keep up. . . .

Part of my response, to circle back to the top of this post, included:

Reading that section of Brooks's book strongly reminded me of playing Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. It's really quite the same process, with each person assuming a role in the story and the group negotiating the narrative together. I've been calling it "group storytelling" for a long time now when trying to explain the appeal and mechanics of the game to people.

I followed that with (in part) this bit from Mark Barrowcliffe in his book The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange:

I think this is the soul of why role-playing games like D&D and EPT were so popular with young boys. They provided a trellis work for the imagination to climb upon and thrive. Unsupported, your day dreams can wither; backed up by rules, pictures, model figures and the input of others, there's no end to the amount of brain space they can consume. . . .

The power of the story, either writing or reading or listening to one, is that the imagination is tied to something that makes it go forward. . . .

Followed later by the following reflection:

And, really, in a very broad sense, isn't this what we're doing when we discuss politics and religion, when we gossip and spread rumors, when we create mission and vision statements for our workplaces, when we try to figure out how to live with one another as neighbors and define ourselves as communities--aren't we really just negotiating the rules of our shared games and trying to find groups to be part of whose styles match our own? How we define reality is up to all of us to figure out together, and it happens in the interplay between us. . . .

And I concluded with much more than this about my love for the Axe Cop books by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle, whose process is similar to everything that's come so far in this post.

A few years ago, Ethan Nicolle was playing with his five-year-old brother Malachai and decided it would be fun to take Malachai’s imagined play and illustrate it as a superhero comic. It all started when Malachai took a toy police officer and added a firefighter’s axe. They grabbed another figure and the nearest weapon-like implement at hand—a recorder, which led to Axe Cop’s first partner, Flute Cop—and went to chop off the heads of dinosaurs and other sundry bad guys. . . .

Ethan takes these wild imaginings and brings them to life splendidly. His illustrations are fun and he does his best to accurately portray Malachai’s intentions without parody or satire, so they end up more “realistic” than cartoonish or stylized. If only all five-year-olds had someone like Malachai to bring their imaginations to life this way, because the opportunity to share in them is a joyful delight.

They're truly wonderful books.

A couple of recent articles of interest.

How to Channel Boredom

Couch potato is a better description of apathy than boredom. Apathy is the absence of any desire. Boredom, by contrast, involves desperately wanting to do something, yet nothing seems to fit the bill.

It’s also incorrect to suggest that boredom is frustration in a different guise. Frustration arises when you are thwarted in the pursuit of your goals. Boredom is the yearning for a goal to pursue in the first place. When you’re bored, whatever you’re doing right now is unfulfilling in some important way; you really want to be engaged, and you’re urgently looking for an activity to satisfy your deep restlessness. . . .

When you experience the discomfort of boredom, it is alerting you to the fact that, like Potter and Humphreys, you’ve become superfluous and pointless; you need to reclaim authorship of your life. You’re having what psychologists call a crisis of agency. You’ve become passive and are currently letting life happen to you: you’re not forming goals or following through on them. You’re not engaged with the world on your terms, pursuing goals that matter to you, that allow you to deploy your skills and talents in a purposeful way. It’s actually a good thing that boredom feels so uncomfortable because without it, you might fail to notice your plight. . . .

Boredom signals a need to look for activities that flow from and give expression to your curiosity, creativity and passion. In short, you need to re-establish your agency.

I don't know if telling yourself stories counts as having agency, but it can feel like it. I also think it can be a way to rest and recharge.

The 7 Types of Rest That Every Person Needs

Physical Rest - Passive physical rest includes sleeping and napping, while active physical rest means restorative activities such as yoga, stretching and massage therapy that help improve the body’s circulation and flexibility.

Mental Rest - Shutting off the brain.

Sensory Rest - Bright lights, computer screens, background noise and multiple conversations — whether they’re in an office or on Zoom calls — can cause our senses to feel overwhelmed. . . . Intentional moments of sensory deprivation can begin to undo the damage inflicted by the over-stimulating world.

Creative Rest - Creative rest reawakens the awe and wonder inside each of us. . . . Allowing yourself to take in the beauty of the outdoors — even if it’s at a local park or in your backyard — provides you with creative rest. . . . it also includes enjoying the arts.

Emotional Rest - Having the time and space to freely express your feelings and cut back on people pleasing.

Social Rest -Relationships that revive us vs. relationships that exhaust us. To experience more social rest, surround yourself with positive and supportive people.

Spiritual Rest - The ability to connect beyond the physical and mental and feel a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose. To receive this, engage in something greater than yourself and add prayer, meditation or community involvement to your daily routine.

That article could really be the basis for a whole new post exploring all kinds of ideas.

Yesterday was an amazing news day, one of those days that we'll eventually read about in history books. It started with more immediate concerns about two run-off elections in Georgia that were bound to be super tight. If both Democrats won, it would flip the Senate for the first time in more than twelve years and give the incoming president the support of both houses of Congress. We eventually found out they did, but while watching we tuned in to the current Congress certifying the results of the presidential election because many had vowed to protest it. Before they could get into it, though, a mob of angry supporters of the current president, believing his lies that he had actually won the election, stormed the Capitol building. We spent the rest of the day anxiously glued to coverage and updates. Many thoughts and emotions. And we're still in the midst of fallout and discovering the repercussions. I won't go into it much more than that because many others will chronicle it more effectively than I could ever hope to.

My main Facebook status for the day, that was followed by many comments from both me and others, was, "Is anyone actually surprised?" Because I wasn't. I've hinted many times on this blog, including recently, at the dynamics that have led up to it. There was nothing surprising about it coming from either the president or his supporters, and we're still waiting to discover just how much support they had from police, officials, and others who were supposed to prevent such a thing.

Here's a brief collection of some of the things I wrote, linked, and collected over the course of the day:

"Stand back. Stand by." Not protestors, not a mob; terrorists attempting a coup.
But, hey, it's not every day you know you're living through something that years in the future you'll read in a history textbook with your grandkids, able to tell them exactly where you were when it happened.
Unrelated to anything, sedition and insurrection are fun words to say. They roll off the tongue so pleasantly.
Former president Obama's Facebook statement
Heather Cox Richardson's chronicle of events
Some among America's military allies believe Trump deliberately attempted a coup and may have had help from federal law-enforcement officials

A screen grab of CNN at one point

With all of that, it was easy to lose track of everything else. One thing I want to make sure to preserve is this bizarre bit of news:

Denmark Launches Children's TV Show About Man With Giant Penis

The Danish equivalent of the BBC, DR, has a new animated series aimed at four- to eight-year-olds about John Dillermand, the man with the world’s longest penis who overcomes hardships and challenges with his record-breaking genitals.

Unsurprisingly, the series has provoked debate about what good children’s television should – and should not – contain.

I have no comment other than amazement that someone thought this a good idea. I'm not bothered, just . . . why?

More seriously, the pandemic is getting worse. Vaccines are on the way--as a secondary healthcare worker, my wife is currently on call to get a dose--but, as I've written before, the worst is yet to come before things get better. Here's a recently story, as an example.

Los Angeles Is Running Out of Oxygen for Patients as Covid Hospitalizations Hit Record Highs Nationwide

Los Angeles County has been so overwhelmed it is running out of oxygen, with ambulance crews instructed to use oxygen only for their worst-case patients. Crews were told not to bring patients to the hospital if they have little hope of survival and to treat and declare such patients dead on the scene to preserve hospital capacity. Several Los Angeles hospitals have turned away ambulance traffic in recent days because they can’t provide the air flow needed to treat patients.

Arizona now has the nation’s highest rate of coronavirus hospitalizations. In the Atlanta area, nearly every major hospital is almost full, prompting state officials to reopen a field hospital for the third time.

The optimism that came with new vaccines and a new year is colliding with a grim reality: The United States has reached the worst stage of the pandemic to date, with the deadly results of holiday gatherings yet to arrive.

As an example. There have also been new strains developing that spread much more rapidly. And yet there are still those who think the whole thing a hoax--or, at least, not concerning--and mask fatigue is very real. Sigh.

A meditative moment of despair by the main character of the last book I read, The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi.

Esalu had probably been right--the one emotion all living creatures shared was not love, but fear. This, most likely, was the hard truth. Men, beasts, all sentient beings that inhabited the planet, were incapable of trust. Somewhere in their hearts, they would always harbor the fear of others. To ensure their own survival, they would continue to devise ways to dominate and control.

Only by binding each other with force, with laws, with religious precepts . . . and with the Silent Whistle, do we finally feel safe . . .

No matter how hard I study the nature of living things, in the end, that's all I will find--just this empty futility.

Even if she returned to Kazalumu safely, how could she ever stand in front of a class to teach? What could she possibly say to her students if the nature of living creatures only made her feel hopeless?

Humans, beasts, bugs--all are but tiny pricks of gleaming in the night--a herd of countless points of light, bound in the darkness of distrust.

She gazed up at the star-spangled sky as she listened to Leelan purr contentedly behind her.

I don't fully agree, but there is some truth there and it's shared poignantly.