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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (31186)	2/18/1999 9:26:00 PM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

This is a counter-revolutionary story, but true. I was for a while the director of a preschool program for "dependent and neglected children" who lives in a 'Home.' The playroom was well stocked with toys of all kinds: big wooden blocks, trucks, fire engines, a dressup corner, dolls and doll clothes... Many of these children arrived at the Home from terribly impoverished environments. There was a family of children who had been born normal, but had been kept in an almost barren room for years. The four year old from that family who came to the preschool was unable to talk beyond making guttural sounds. When the children were released into the playroom, the almost inevitable pattern was for the boys to run to the big blocks and begin making houses and forts, or to the small ones, out of which they would make roads or garages for the vehicles; and for the girls to run over to the dressup corner and adorn themselves, and to select dolls (which, tellingly, they beat and screamed at in between feedings and changes of clothing.) Sometimes the girls would play with blocks, usually for the purpose of constructing beds for their dolls. This reminds me of a story I may have told here. If I have, sorry. We had many friends who disapproved of our allowing our son to play with toy guns. We felt it was harmless, and that with their prohibitions, given that other children played with guns, they were making their children much more conscious of guns, specifically of their violent aspect, than our boy was. Our son seemed to think it was a prop for a special sort of 'tag,' as in bang bang you're out. Well, once we were spending a few days at the beach with the most strictly anti-toy-gun parents of all and their son Danny, and at breakfast Danny, to his parents' mortification, took his toast and with quick little bites turned it into a toast gun, which he shot us all with.