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Children in Russia orphanages can often spend long hours in play with meager resources: No crates of building blocks, no bins of art supplies, no dress-up clothes, no grown-ups directing or scheduling the activities. It doesn’t sound like an ideal environment.
And yet, I think there’s a flip side to orphanage life. A side of creativity and inventiveness, an ability to create entertainment almost out of nothing. I read about it over and over again in the e-mails that Rose Alaimo sent back from her volunteer vacation in Russian orphanages and camps this summer. And I often see it in my house, especially in these waning days of summer vacation.
Yesterday, my little guy, who lived in a Sakhalin orphanage until a few months short of his fifth birthday, asked for the glue and big scissors (I keep both out of ordinary reach because they often lead to experiments and haircuts). He carefully separated a cardboard box that had delivered my latest round of Internet shopping into several pieces. This box, I should add, had already done exemplary duty as a garage for his rescue vehicles and a dinosaur shelter. What was he doing with the box now, I asked?
“I’m making a tank,” came the answer.
My little guy had been playing for several days with a toy tank belonging to a neighbor’s child, while that child enjoyed one of his toys. But the toy exchange had recently ended, and I guess he was missing the tank. And so, he started scouring the house for tank-building supplies. Plastic cups and pencils were marshaled into service as wheels and axels. A plastic lid got glued on top.
No, it wasn’t the sturdiest tank I’ve ever seen. But it was his. He had made it, and he had entertained himself for more than an hour as he found and put together the parts. An hour that I got to spend on polishing two pieces of a big assignment that I’m striving to finish.
Now, I’m not going to tell you that undirected play should be the only thing in a child’s life. But it does have a definite role in his or her development, one that the American Academy of Pediatrics recognized in a report issued early this year. And I’d like to think that it’s because my son was so often in charge of his own entertainment that he is so inventive now.
Let the creativity roll!
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I think handing kids finished products, especially top-of-the-line, cutting-edge stuff, all the time does them such a disservice. Imagination and creativity come from turning nothings into amazing somethings, and it’s more of a stretch … a growth stretch … when that takes more effort than dumping out a vat of Leggos.
I’d love to see that tank!
What a great story! Thanks.
It is a wonderfull story. We only hear about all the bad and frigthtening things which delays kidds growing up in a institution. So it is comforting to hear that sometimes also a positive skill may be developped during that period
thanks
It’s funny to see the mention of Legos. My kids have gotten several of the new Lego kits, which direct kids to make one particular project, as gifts. But they play the most, and the most creatively, with the 40-year-old set of Legos that my parents keep at their house! The blocks are just white, red and gray, the shapes are limited, there are no motors, but there are also no rules to limit their ideas.