Fantasy Play-Acting and Child Development

Many of us in modern societies seem to have a distinct prejudice against play. If an activity is fun then it must not be productive. Certainly we don't generally consider education to be fun - and neither does the average kid. However, it's long been noted by various child educators and psychologists that young children learn as much through their bodies as their minds - that is, they learn by doing, not by thinking about abstract concepts. Certainly, if you give them a book to read or write a lesson out for them on the chalkboard, they'll retain a certain percentage of the content. But activities instill them with lessons deep down in their bones.

So play gets a bad rap; and of all the modes of child play, fantasy is probably the least esteemed. "Fantasy" is a dreaded word that adults often translate into "not in reality". But children are not yet involved in an adult's reality of career, bills, and relationships anyway. They are busy developing their budding psyches, and their minds need imagination as much as their bodies need nutrients. Their five senses and their intellect can tell them what is "out there" in the world, but it is imagination that whispers to them about what can be done with all of that raw material. It opens up the possibilities, and it is from this place that they begin to discover a sense of self. Children explore the potentials that they sense within themselves through fantasy play-acting.

Many renowned thinkers of the last century - among them, the psychologist Carl Jung and mythology scholar Joseph Campbell - have recognized certain primal images that exist deep within the minds of every human being. These images are called archetypes; and they serve, overall, as a kind of blueprint for the growth of the human psyche. They could be thought of as a kind of spiritual DNA. When children engage in fantasy play-acting and adopt the personas of knights (Jedi or Arthurian), wizards, witches, and warriors, they are evoking and exploring these archetypal images in their imaginations. They are literally dipping deep into the creative wellspring from which each of our identities arises.

How quickly they jump from idea to idea, from one possibility to the next! It's almost as if they're remembering rather than inventing: tapping into the vast ancestral memory of our race. Before they've begun learning arithmetic they've already gotten a taste of what it's like to be the hero and the villain, the ancient wise one and the young innocent.

Though there's a lot that we as parents and educators are charged with educating our children about, they have perhaps as much to learn on their own, spontaneously, as they pursue their own inner fantasies through play-acting. This is probably one of the finest examples of the mind serving as its own instructor - in the school of life - and we would do well to let it run its course.