This summer, a friend and I are planning to split childcare: I’ll take them in the morning; he’ll have them in the afternoon. Even though we have very different parenting styles (and both think that the other one is completely wrong), I was actually thinking that everything was going to work out just fine–that is, until we got on to the subject of playing, and the fact that, I don’t.
It all came up when we were discussing strategies for what to do during swimming lessons: because the children are all at different levels, their lessons will be at different times throughout the morning. The question that arose was: what to do with the non-swimming children while the swimmers are in the pool?
My answer was: nothing. There is a perfectly lovely playground on one side of the pool; even better, there’s a perfectly unlovely ditch on the other side of it, full of all sorts of broken glass, dead animals and flood-mangled garbage; in short, child heaven. His answer, on the other hand, was that I should bring a ball. “A ball? What for?” I asked, thinking that the only possible use for a ball would be as a weapon to drive the children back into the playground/ditch whenever they came out chanting their “I’m bored” mantra, and, realistically, to repel a revolt like that I would need a whole lot more than just one lousy ball (luckily, this ditch also comes well-supplied with rocks).
He, however, was obviously thinking something completely different:“To play with them,” he said. “Otherwise, what’s the point of having you watch them?” I considered telling him that the point was for me to make sure that they only lit one M-60 at a time, didn’t run with my good scissors, and didn’t get ripped off too badly by the local drug dealers (“You paid what? For that?”), but instead I confined myself to one raised eyebrow, my best “have we met?” look, and a clearly enunciated, “I-don’t-play.” The problem with that answer, though, was that technically it was not strictly true: I do play, but only on my own terms.
For example: I love playing board games that don’t involve the Gumdrop Forest; croquet when the main objective is to knock everyone else’s ball off of the field; and even a nice game of “horse” on the basketball court (it gives me a chance to show off my deadly “reverse granny” shot). However, my love for all those games is confined to the times when I am the one who actually wants to play them, and not when they are demanded of me by some child complaining about being bored.
I think that boredom is underrated. As adults we sometimes lose sight of this, perhaps because we confuse it with tedium, a condition we encounter so often either in our jobs or in unfulfilling tasks such as standing in line at the DMV. It is tedium, therefore, that we think we are rescuing our children from whenever we answer their complaints of boredom with x-boxes and playdates, which is really too bad, because true boredom is as rare as it is wonderful. It is the catalyst that is needed to invent all the truly great games of childhood, the ones that send you limping into the house at the end of the day with mysterious bruises and sworn blood oaths “not to tell”; the games that can only exist in the vacuum of adult interference and structured “play activities” (unless, of course, the adult who is structuring these activities happens to be Courteney Love).
It is boredom that leads to the kind of games that are dangerous, shocking, and profane, the ones that test their participants to their utmost limits. In other words, the very best possible sort. Good luck getting all that out of a ball.