Honestly this poster got it right.

I look at the play and language that comes home from school with out 7yo and, well, yuck! So much focus on being a “rich guy”, comparison, taunting. It sucks! I recognize that there’s also the element of being seven and growing up in here, but I’m also a firm believer that play reflects the ambient noise children are exposed to.

We are looking at moving schools again but at some point it just feels like an honest reflection of a sick society.

  • damnatum_seditiosus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    12·
    7 days ago

    I have a book, never quite managed to finish it, called : Children and play in the holocaust by George Eisen - where the author shows the kind of games children were playing in the ghetto.

    It’s quite grim as you can imagine, but it portrays your main idea there, as play is a powerful tool for kids to adapt and learn about what is required in their society. Off the top of my head, some children were acting gestapo probing where a kid would play an agent and tried to find secret information from a member of the “resistance” group. The goal of the game was to keep quiet of course. From my years in education at uni, I was quite invested into free play and how to organize it within a summer day camp where I worked, now I have to get back to the books I haven’t finished yet !

  • Lavender [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    7 days ago

    Did anyone else play Guns? My neighbors just called it Guns. It felt like a parody, but we’d get toy guns from a tub and just pretend to shoot each other.

    • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      pretty much everywhere one might gaze is an ad for an affluent lifestyle and I’m sure, at some point in a child asking what something is or how to get one, someone older has said something along the lines of “that’s for rich people”.

      clothes, cars, gadgets/games, accessories. the more expensive, the more provocative and compelling the ad usually is.

      kids know rich man exists, that he has things others don’t, so some will want to be one at play.

      I want to meet the kid who says he wants to be poor man. and this discussion has unlocked a core memory:

      I remember being real young and playing “cops and bad guys” and one kid said he should get to be the cop because his dad is a cop. my parents were divorced and my father was unemployed generally, so I said my dad was a robber. cop kid said his dad was going to catch my dad. so I said my dad would shoot his dad, and then I had to go sit on the mats at recess. lmao.