À la recherche du temps perdu

Anastasia De Waal, 31 August 2010

Proust’s madeleines may evoke a merry-go-round of warm childish memories, but a trip to Disneyland Paris is the stuff of nightmares, writes Annaliese Briggs.

Research commissioned by the corporation behind a magical kingdom not so far away suggests that one in five parents have ‘forgotten’ how to play with their children.  This poses the question: ‘why bother?’ when both parent and child can have their Mickey Mouse pasta shapes served by a preened and polished Barbie doll, fireworks on cue to explode half past the hour, every hour, and round the clock entertainment at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

I’ve regularly consoled myself with the thought that, though I find playtime in excess of 20 minutes with other people’s children unbearably monotonous, with my own I’ll have an invested maternal interest in their creative and imaginative development.   Clearly I am laboring under a misapprehension.  One third of the 2,000 parents interviewed for the report conducted by Tanya Byron, clinical child psychologist by day and Minnie Mouse by night, tardily raised their hands and confessed to finding game-playing with their families ‘boring.’  These parents should not be punished for their misgivings, and are perhaps part of a majority made up with dishonest parents amongst the sample.   Of the 2,000 interviewees aged between five and fifteen years, one-tenth have their wits about them and can detect the waning enthusiasm in mummy and daddy’s voices when offering Pooh Bear another slice of cake.  With sibling rivalry pitched as the biggest problem for nearly a third of disenchanted families gathering around the Monopoly board, passing the dice to your offspring and making a swift exit isn’t a quick fix solution.  Negotiating disputes between the proprietors of Trafalgar Square and Bond Street is no less tiring than participating.

Byron urges parents to consider the four key components of ‘successful playtime’ – ‘education, inspiration, integration and communication.’  Parents should ‘take a step back and think back to how their own childhood games used these four pillars and how they can implement them now.’  However, for parents involved in the remembrance of things past, rendering a penchant for make-believe is no simple task.

Have parents ‘forgotten’ how to play with their children? Or, is the state of play a state of mind—an indulgence in nostalgia necessarily bereft of children.  Mary Bowers eloquently articulates a rise of Peter Pan syndrome in today’s timesonline.com.  Museums and zoos are child’s play, but increasingly venues are holding exclusive evenings, for adults only. ‘After dark, when children close their eyes, their toys come alive—or so the grown-ups would have them believe,’ writes Bowers.

Rather than advising the personal pursuit play, for once we need another child-centred approach.  Play needn’t have a Kleinian ulterior motive, for parent or child. Parents need to be encouraged to enjoy watching and engaging as a pursuit in itself, and should relish the times when they lose themselves, if only momentarily, with their children, Pooh Bear, and a miniature tea set.