My Connections to Play

Two quotes that I feel summarize what play represented for me in childhood are following.

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. Stacia Tauscher

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything. ~Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone Scelto

I chose them because they contrast who I was in childhood and who I am now.  I in childhood was all about “now” and so busy finding out what I wanted to do with things I had around me. I never got bored and always felt I needed more time to play. My favorite items were old mattresses I was able to build forte, walls, a house and beds, and leaves and petals which I was able to use to make juice and chemical liquid. Another important thing was my legs and feet. It was just fun to run around, walking on the rocks and jumping from the gates.

When I was little, people supported play letting us play freely. It is unbelievable now but children were allowed to play alone in the park, run around and ride a bike in the neighborhood and take trips of up to a couple of miles to look for adventures. But adults and communities were watching us to be safe from criminals and they trusted us to find out what dangers were around by ourselves.

 I feel that plays are different now and when I was a child in regards with what we play with. I do not remember having many toys. I played outside a lot. Things like leaves, dirt, rocks were toys to me and finding out what I could do was the fun part.  But children nowadays have many toys. However, my daughter sometimes uses them in the ways which are not made to use so. For example, puzzle pieces becomes vegetables when she plays kitchen and becomes money when she plays shopping. I feel that the nature of children hasn’t changed much but the environment has changed.

I remember play was the fun of thinking and challenges when I was a child. I believe what I involve with is different now but I still like thinking and challenges because I know the fun of them and it enriches my life. I worry that environment surrounding children might not be various and wide enough to satisfy their curiosity and potential since adults limit where children go and what they play with because of the safety issues.

Relationship Reflection

Relationships are important because we can have fun together, support each other and learn together. I have positive relationships with several Japanese mothers.  The factors that contributed to developing and maintaining these relationships are that we have common backgrounds and common interests.  We are Japanese women living in the U.S., we have children who are similar ages, we are concerned with our children’s bilingual education, we sometimes want to have fun together without children, and so on.  I think it is important to have similar standards for disciplining children and similar personalities. A challenge I have experienced are that it is hard to keep motivated to maintain the relationships when we have very different standards for discipline.  I lost my motivation to maintain a relationship with a friend who did not watch her child in the park, let her child do violent actions to other friends and let the child do things that are not allowed such as cutting through somebody’s yard.  I was stressed for a long time with this relationship because I didn’t know if I was being too strict or caring too much about small details. But I found out that it is better to be with people with similar values when it comes to raising a child because it is too important.

My experiences with relationships with a lot of mothers allow me to understand each parent has different ways of raising children. They will also lead me to have occasions to promote parent-parent relationships and I will try to solve issues with relationships between children because I understand that parents care about peers’ influences as much as teacher’s teaching skills.