Young people today

I had a young friend come to stay with me for three days this week. Aged nine, he flew down unac­com­pan­ied from Can­berra because it was the last week of school holidays.

Having him here was grand, des­pite my emo­tional tur­moil around per­sonal issues. There were a couple of obser­va­tions I made though.

The first is com­plic­ated: he noticed that I have Lego from the castle range, the town range and space stuff. He decided that meant we could build a whole civil­iz­a­tion. I’m sure it’s straight out of some video game but he grasped the con­cepts and details really well. In the medi­aeval times, we had to be attacked by armies whose tech­no­lo­gies were more advanced than ours in order to learn and advance ourselves. By the indus­trial revolu­tion, we could advance through train­ing sci­ent­ists. The more sci­ent­ists we had, the faster we could invent things. (I inven­ted coal mining and elec­tri­city. He inven­ted factor­ies. I charged him gold for the elec­tri­city and coal he needed for factor­ies and then inven­ted banks. He inven­ted petrol and then star­ted to take over the world with cars and air flight…). 

This is all great, but he was very adam­ant that any­thing other than war was boring. When we got to space, he wanted things to fight again and he wanted to race through the indus­trial revolu­tion as fast as we could because there were no wars and it was boring (oh, really? Need­less to say, I didn’t tell him about the vari­ous wars…). We had infin­ite resources, he said. I star­ted explain­ing that war soun­ded pretty unne­ces­sary then, as it had mostly been about access to resources, but he said it was about get­ting more land. That’s a link I wasn’t ready to explain yet.

So, how to address this one? He’s right his­tor­ic­ally. Com­pet­i­tion and war have advanced our ‘civil­isa­tion’ inso­faras advanced means get­ting bigger and better weapons and tech­no­lo­gies. And for that matter, I was using cap­it­al­ism as a his­tor­ical learn­ing tool rather than play­ing my ‘ideal’ world. 

When I said I didn’t want to play war any more and could we do some­thing else, he said “what else is there?”. Everything I came up with was com­pet­i­tion-based: races and games. I have the Lego movie set, but even that involved the dino­saur stomp­ing on the build­ings and the people – some­thing bigger that we needed to fight. Mind you, I kept the ambu­lance run­ning back and forth when he stomped on crew mem­bers rather than ‘actors’. Wasn’t it fun just to build, I asked? No, what’s the fun in that? I was told. So I built the space sta­tion and the sci­ence lab while his ‘men’ were out fight­ing Jar Jar (don’t ask, it’s hawk_eye’s fault, I’m sure). I need to come up with inter­est­ing non-com­pet­i­tion-based play for my Lego people.

The other issue is gender. When we were play­ing with the hos­pital, I found ‘girl’ hair and put it on the doctor. Kyle informed me that girls can’t be doc­tors, they can only be nurses. You can ima­gine my reac­tion! I said I knew many girl doc­tors and that boys can be nurses too. It really sad­dens me that these sorts of atti­tudes are still prevalent.

In the end, when there was only one space helmet left and my sci­ent­ist didn’t have any weapons, his ‘leader’ offered to give it to her so she could return to Earth. I said she didn’t need it, as she had found her life’s work and there was enough air in the recyc­ling sys­tems of the space sta­tion to last her a life­time. He said she needed someone to pro­tect her. I said that wasn’t true at all! But I did acknow­ledge that she might get lonely, so when the wan­der­ing hacker who’d broken into the alien robot’s pro­gram­ming sequences turned out to still be around, she was quite happy with that idea. Kyle wasn’t so sure. A big, strong sol­dier was what she needed, surely? 

At the same time, he was happy with the idea that my “leader” in the medi­aeval times could have been a woman, pre­sum­ably again a hangover from video games, where there are scantily clad female fight­ers and adven­tur­ers. How media influ­ences culture!

How obvi­ous it is that chil­dren rehearse social­ity and norm-test­ing in play.

Any great ideas for how to handle these sorts of situ­ations? What sorts of non-gender, non-com­pet­i­tion play can we come up with that isn’t boring?