Confederate troops' advance halted by call of 'tea time!'Classic Mail story here: 'One third of parents think playing with their children is boring'. This, apparently, is cause for concern, that some kind of art is dying.
Certainly in things like card games and chess, my dad and mum were happy to play, time permitting, and were sure to give no quarter. The family competitive spirit and disdain for bad losers was instilled at an early age. A child crying because they lost a game was treated not with sympathy but derision - and rightly so.
These kind of games allowed us children to enter into an equality with adults, and taught us the manners of social interaction, quite different to the games I would play by myself, with my toy soldiers and child's imagination. Without doubt, the flights of fancy of the young mind, the role-playing of numerous 2-inch-high gun-fighters, facing off across an anthill in my back garden was of no interest to any adult, nor should it be.
Certainly in things like card games and chess, my dad and mum were happy to play, time permitting, and were sure to give no quarter. The family competitive spirit and disdain for bad losers was instilled at an early age. A child crying because they lost a game was treated not with sympathy but derision - and rightly so.
These kind of games allowed us children to enter into an equality with adults, and taught us the manners of social interaction, quite different to the games I would play by myself, with my toy soldiers and child's imagination. Without doubt, the flights of fancy of the young mind, the role-playing of numerous 2-inch-high gun-fighters, facing off across an anthill in my back garden was of no interest to any adult, nor should it be.
Contrary to the implication of the article, parents playing with their kids in this latter sense is a very recent phenomenon, inspired by the most dubious of trendy psychologistic wank.
5 comments:
Yes, the last word sums it up.
It was a rare occasion when my parents had time to actually sit and play games. Their w/ends were spent cooking, cleaning, baking and diy-ing while I and my friends entertained each other. If we were thrown out of one home we'd move on to the next. I don't think there's anything here for parents to worry about so long as their child has lots of friends and isn't sitting alone in his/her bedroom on a computer.
GV,
I fear this latter is all too common.
The problem is that we can't live in the past, TT - we have to deal with the here & now. Thanks to 40yrs of government which thought more of itself than the country we now have a society so screwed up it complains at the drop of a hat, whinges all the time, argues, knifes, shoots or stays at home (or perhaps that's only in London?).
We have a generation of feckless f/wits parenting badly-educated children - the outcome was never in doubt so where these think-tanks & quangos get off thinking that they know better than we do I don't know!
As for Cameron bringing in the great unelected from the nannying left and the nudging right - I'm almost speechless but I won't go on. Thanks for the rant :-)
I guess one's first responsibility is to those nearest and dearest to us, bring them up and educate them as best we can, and to counter the malign influences.
We can't live in the past, but we should remember it, because otherwise we'll lose perspective on what is happening in our society.
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