In this work, we will get acquainted with the sides of children’s territorial behavior hidden from adults. Many of them are based on violation of territorial prohibitions. Moreover, the prohibitions are quite reasonable, with the need for which any sane person of any age will agree.
But children are guided here not by reason. Some incomprehensible, but powerful force, contrary to reason and fear, attracts children to transcend these prohibitions, or at least stand at a dangerous threshold and experience something exceptionally important, without which it will be difficult to live on.
We are entering the holy of holies of a secret children’s world, where children do not invite everyone. Much of what will be discussed, children hide from adults. But I hope that the story of children’s secrets will not become a betrayal in relation to them. After all, the children themselves are happy and grateful to show, tell, take to secret places, if they feel the sincere interest of an adult, his ability to empathize and respectful attitude to what is revealed to him.
Let’s try to be like that — we will remove value judgments and tune in to accept what is described below as a given. This knowledge will not only help to understand the actions of children, but will also allow you to look into the depths of the human soul. I hope that many readers will remember the half-forgotten events of their own childhood.
On this path, we will have two main tasks: to describe the living reality of children’s experience of communicating with the environment and try to answer the question: why all this? from a psychological point of view.
Let’s first look at how very young children behave on a walk. At the age of one and a half to two years, the child gradually begins to establish his own, individually-personal relationships with objects of interest to him outside the home. On the way, he may meet a beautiful flower, a jumping frog, a worm, a puddle. The child instantly translates his interest in them into action: to pick a flower, to catch a frog, etc. But most often, in order to make contact with the object of his interest, the child must resort to the help of an intermediary — a mother or an accompanying adult.
But already at two and a half — three years old, playing on the playground, the child independently builds relationships with swings, ladders, slides, sandboxes. He quickly and without outside help finds an approach to them and feels well what game possibilities lie in these objects and how they can be put at the service of his desires. Sometimes a child calls on his mother for help, sometimes he wants to show her his achievements, but to a greater extent he needs her as a starting point and emotional support. Having made another trip to the ladder or hill, the child returns to his mother, like a climber to the base camp. Clinging to his mother, caressing her, feeling that she is here, in place, that she loves him, that everything is in order, the child with a light heart again sets off in search of adventure. This continues until he tries everything more or less attractive in the place where he walks. After that, he wants to move on with his mother to a new place.
The older the child becomes, the more persistently he tries to act on the stage of life as a separate from his mother, independent and capable being. This is both interesting and scary. The reverse side of growing independence is the feeling of one’s smallness, defenselessness, loneliness, fear, which periodically visits the child when he is alone with the vast and incomprehensible world around. It is very difficult to be a lonely swimmer in the waves of the sea of life. Need support. In search of support, the child develops his activity in two directions.
On the one hand, despite the gradual weakening of the symbiotic attachment to the mother, that is, complete dependence on the mother and merging with her, the mother continues to play the role of the central support on which the world of the child rests. However, in striving to expand and consolidate his autonomy, the child tries to ensure that the mother takes into account his growing independence and seeks new forms of relationships and cooperation. The child wants the mother’s complicity, but not in all cases and without suppressing his own activity.
On the other hand, after three years, the child begins to pay more and more attention to peers. He discovers that it is possible to play not side by side, as it was before, but together. Between the ages of three and five, the child intensively masters the difficult practice of interacting with his own kind in the game, and then in other situations.
This is how children’s social life begins. The main discovery of children of this age is the idea of partnership. This word with the Latin root «part» — «part» exactly corresponds to the Russian word «complicity». Role play, which enters the child’s behavioral repertoire between the ages of three and five, becomes the main model of partner interactions for children. In relation to the play action as a whole, each child who joins it in a certain role becomes a part of the process, one of the structure-forming elements of the situation — its participant. Willy-nilly, he also turns out to be a member of a children’s play group, and his actions begin to obey the psychological laws of group life common to all people, regardless of whether the child wants it or not. If he wants to play, he will have to endure some unpleasant but necessary restrictions on freedom of action that arise due to the presence of other participants. The child agrees to such restrictions as a result of a difficult struggle with himself and others, but the game is worth the candle.
The participation of several children in the game increases its complexity, the unexpectedness of its plot moves, helps to get out of creative impasses, and, of course, turns previously ethereal fantasies into reality, filling them with living relationships and experiences. As for the so-called «games with the rules» — tags, hide and seek, Cossack robbers, etc. — so beloved in senior preschool — primary school age, they are basically impossible without a company.
Street children’s play groups form spontaneously, but usually their backbone is made up of children living in the neighborhood. Having familiar children with whom you can regularly play is of great value for a child after three years (as well as for their parents). It can be said that the number of peers corresponding to gender, age, development, as well as the variety of convenient places to play are important characteristics of the richness of the environment in which the child lives.
The children’s yard company usually unites children of the same age with a maximum difference between the oldest and the youngest of two to three years. Such a moderate difference in age is of great psychological significance, therefore it is typical as a principle of organizing naturally developing children’s societies. Different ages create the necessary difference in mental potentials, stimulating all members of the group.
The little ones highly appreciate their participation, they are glad that the elders condescended to them and took them with them, they try not to lose face. The elders clearly see their difference from the younger ones, they are forced to take this into account, but at the same time they get an excellent opportunity to satisfy their desire for power and experience a sense of their own significance.
Children prefer to perform active actions aimed at exploring the world around them not alone, but in a group. This is doubly beneficial for them. First, children of the same age have similar age-related problems that determine their needs. Therefore, they understand each other’s interests well and on this basis they easily unite in order to create and experience important events for them together.
Secondly, each individual participant feels stronger, fearless, confident in the group, and their actions are justified. In relations with the world, he no longer feels like a speck of dust in front of a cloud. Figuratively speaking, the small «I» of the child acquires an additional, more powerful social body in the form of a group of peers, forming something like a «collective I» at the moment when children unite for some common feats.
Once upon a time, social psychologists argued about whether a couple of people is a small group or a group starts with three. Our studies of the children’s subculture still allow us to say that for children a group arises when there are two. That is, for a child, the situation changes qualitatively at the moment of uniting with another, when you can say: “I am not alone,” when the pronoun “we” appears.
Group visits to «terrible places» are one of the earliest attempts at independent exploration and emotional experience of significant elements of the environment and the formation of a children’s myth about the world. In my materials, the first evidence of such visits mainly refers to the age of five years.
“At the age of five or six, my girlfriend and I approached a broken basement window. From there came a specific smell of charm, there was something noisy, squelching — it was interesting, but very scary. Often we looked for a long time in this darkness for something. And then they wrote that they saw something terrible — like a rat — and ran away with a squeal.
“In the summer we played a lot in our yard-well on asphalt hot from the sun. We were five or six years old. Sometimes we would gather in a group, cautiously enter the front door and go down three steps to the heavy, iron-bound basement door.
If it was ajar, then we stood for several seconds at this dark crack and listened to the strange gurgling of water in the depths of the cellar. It was very scary to put my head in that gap. Yes, no one did. It seemed that the iron door would immediately close and the head would remain in the basement, and the body outside. Then we hurriedly ran back to the yard. I will always remember the contrast between the heat that exuded from all the objects on the street, and the icy penetrating dampness of the entrance to the basement.
“We were very afraid of a small wooden door at the height of a child in the corner of our yard. Behind it was a strange shallow niche where the janitor kept sand. It was always damp, and from there dampness was felt through the cracks. We sometimes went there all together to feel it. It was scary. The children said that the dead lay there. I somehow believed in it, although we approached a couple of times when the janitor took sand, and saw that there was a small space and there was nothing like that.
An astute reader must have noticed in all the examples given the similarity of the description of the entrance to the “terrible place”, which consists in experiencing it as a magical opening into a qualitatively different space, where the child is terribly afraid to be, because it is not for living people. In descriptions of «terrible places» (most often these are basements), children usually note their darkness, cold, the smell of dampness and decay — their grave, belonging to the world of the dead. It is assumed that there are terrible inhabitants who are not people.
Another characteristic feature of scary space is its ability to change its metric. Objectively, it may look small, like the sandbox in the last example. But in a strange way, this space can expand immensely, accommodating anything — just like a niche with sand can accommodate the supposed dead.
It is striking that in the special space of the «terrible place» even time flows differently. Remarkable evidence of this is given in the story of a Petersburg girl:
“When I was seven or eight years old, we lived on the outskirts, and there was a small abandoned building. It seems that before the war it was a brick factory. There were rumors that during the blockade it was used as a crematorium — the corpses of those who died of starvation were burned. And the children said that if you come up and look very quickly through the window, you can see burning stoves and corpses there. We walked around, looked in, but it was somehow bad, because we couldn’t see anything.”
It turns out that the events that have long passed in this world (historical) are still ongoing in that world (eternal). Anyone who is able to jump over the time border between the two worlds will be able to get in touch with the events of that world. To do this, you need to act super-fast.
Similar advice on how to see representatives of another, invisible world, we find in the rules of children’s «evocations». «Evocations» is a children’s magical practice, passed down as a folklore tradition from generation to generation of children. With the help of certain procedures, children “summon” gnomes, the Queen of Spades, devils, etc. Sometimes this is done in order to make sure that they really exist and can appear, and sometimes to put them at the service of their interests (for example, they must fulfill the wish of the child). In any case, there is also a crossing of the border between two worlds. Usually, the children propose to judge the success of the «summoning» by indirect signs — by the traces left by the «summoned ones». But it is believed that they can really be seen if, performing magical actions, the child has time to look very quickly at the right place.
Here you can recall many similar facts from the world of magic and adult folklore. In particular, Carlos Castaneda, a student ethnographer who studied ancient wisdom with the Mexican Indian magician don Juan, describes in one of his famous books how don Juan explained to him that every person has a left behind worth his death. Death, the presence of which must always be remembered, taken into account and consulted with in situations of life choice. It can be seen as a flashing cloud or shadow at a short distance behind your back, if you are not afraid to suddenly and quickly look to the left.
Let’s get back to the kids. Children’s fears associated with openings, cavities and receptacles inside their own home belong to the early period of life, although they can persist for a long time. Usually they arise by themselves, and the child does not know how to deal with them. He is simply afraid of «scary places» and tries to avoid them (read more about this in the article «Children’s horror stories»). A completely new stage in the child’s communication with what he is afraid of begins at the age of five or six years. These are group visits to «scary places» outside the home. Children go there to stand on the border of the familiar and lived-in daily world and the entrance to another world. What for? To feel existential horror. This is the first attempt to actively cope with it, when the child, having united with others, no longer avoids, but, on the contrary, seeks a meeting with the terrible and is ready to come into contact with it.
«Horrible places» gradually begin to move into the category of «terribly interesting.» They go there not just to experience, but to explore, that is, to purposefully learn them. In parallel, between six-seven and nine-ten years, the symbolic processing of these fears by the children’s collective consciousness begins. This happens when children tell each other traditional scary stories, which are one of the genres of children’s folklore. The transition from the first stage of the child’s communication with the “terrible place” to the second is quite accurately reflected in the girl’s testimony:
“When I was six or seven years old, together with the guys from our yard, we often looked into the basement of the house, but we did not go further than three meters, which were lit. The basement was very large, with tu.e.mi, long — under the whole house with ten front doors.
Then someone got a flashlight, and everyone decided to explore this basement. The rest of the children were one or two years older than me, and one boy was a couple of years older than everyone else. They went down to the basement and went deeper, but I could not go further than three meters from the entrance.
When I looked forward into this darkness with those, my feet were rooted to the ground. It seemed to me that there was some kind of abyss, an abyss, that the earth ended there. I felt small, weak and defenseless. When the children returned, I envied their courage, but explained this by the fact that they are older than me and can, even should not be afraid. And I’m small, and I’m forgiven.»
A little more time passes, and for younger schoolchildren, especially boys, the study of the “terrible place” turns out to be a group action that has several psychological goals at once. It becomes a test of courage and at the same time its training. It makes it possible to satisfy the exploratory instincts, as well as the desire for personal self-affirmation. It is also a way of ascertaining the status of each participant in the group hierarchy, because the limits of each person’s capabilities are clearly manifested in where one stops.
“Away from home, between the ages of five and nine, basements were scary places for us. To study them, we boys gathered in large groups. Armed with sticks, stones, took more flashlights and went there. Moreover, the group was immediately clearly divided according to the degree of fear: the most daring walked in front with lanterns, the middle ones a little behind, and the cowards were far behind and did not move far from the entrance.
It turned out that the route of the group through the basement was clearly marked by boys with flashlights. Each of them could not move beyond some of its limits and, having reached it, remained in place, but did not return back to the ordinary world.
We explored the cellar, hoping to find something of interest. And since many objects were of interest to us at this age, we almost always had prey. We also frightened each other, especially the less courageous ones, by leaving them alone in the dark.”
In this testimony, the boy noted a characteristic feature of children’s behavior — a clear sense of his personal limit in a test situation. Whether a child participates in children’s tests of courage, whether on a walk he chooses which of the ice slides he can move off, whether he climbs onto a play structure on the playground — in all these cases, a mentally healthy child intuitively feels where he needs to stop in order to return safely . Where the child is ready to go and where he is not, serves for himself, as well as for his friends, an indicator of the degree of his personal strength, psychological age and ability to claim a certain place in the children’s group.
“We were seven or eight years old. My girlfriend and I were walking, and she went into the basement to pee. She didn’t invite me. The door was open and I was on guard outside. I stood and thought: “How brave she is!”
In the summer, in a dacha or in a village where there are many children of different ages who are well acquainted with each other, trips to “terrible places” are sometimes organized with a large number of participants and a complex set of tasks. Usually this happens when there is an older ringleader around whom the core of the children’s company is grouped.
I observed such a campaign in the Volga village of Baryshskaya Sloboda in the summer of 1981. The organizer of the whole enterprise was a thirteen-year-old girl who enjoyed unconditional authority among local children of all ages. Among them, she was known as a wise, just and «public» person. In the children’s community of Bar-Sloboda, she was that rare, but inexhaustible type of righteous person with whom the Russian land is held. I am very pleased that now there is an opportunity to devote a few lines to her.
Calm, balanced beyond her years and internally sedate, she was an extraordinary patriot of her village, which was quickly deserted due to the departure of young people. She passionately loved everything here, knew well the history of the village and the people living there. At the age of thirteen, she had already firmly decided to stay here forever in any capacity, but in general she dreamed of becoming a postman — a person who helps to establish communication between people. She understood this as a mission and actually already carried it out: on her own initiative she helped several old women, at the same time adopting a folk tradition from them, and did a lot with children.
Since the most important human value for this girl was cohesion, or rather, catholicity, she made quite a lot of efforts to unite the children’s street community on the basis of common games and interesting enterprises for everyone. One such enterprise, which had been practiced, according to local children, for several years, was going to the cemetery to tell scary stories there. Such trips were organized only once or twice during the summer — both because it was supposed to be a rare and special event, and because the matter was troublesome and needed preparation.
The preparation consisted in informing all the children about what was coming a few days in advance and hiding it from the adults. Since the village was rather large, at the appointed hour, in the evening, at the beginning of the eighth, a crowd of children gathered about thirty people. The bulk were children of nine or twelve years old, but there were also three small people among them, five or six years old, who followed their older brothers and sisters. They took the little ones so that they would not betray anyone to adults, but looked at them with doubt. Excited marchers cheered each other on. Despite their determination, they were all afraid, because the cemetery was considered magically powerful, a truly «terrible place» that was not to be trifled with, and the whole enterprise was daring. There were more girls than boys. Several people reported that, just like last year, a group of boys were going to ambush the walkers in the bushes: they would cover themselves with sheets and howl like ghosts (which happened later).
Finally, a motley crowd of children moved along the road through the village, then went beyond the outskirts and stretched across the meadow. It was still light, but the onset of evening was already felt: the sounds became muffled, and the air became colder. The younger children themselves found themselves at the end of the procession.
The last houses passed beyond the outskirts and the road began to descend from a small hillock to the meadow, so that, looking back, one could see only the roofs of the houses, the smallest ones got excited and immediately all moved back together. A little later, as the dampness of the evening air grew stronger and the twilight intensified, some of the older children slowly began to fall behind. One by one, they silently and unexpectedly separated from the group of those walking, as if they knew for sure that they could not go further than some invisible line, and wandered back, uniting on the way back in small silent groups. Those who were in front did not seem to notice those who were behind.
By the middle of the road, when the cemetery was already not far away, the composition of the group was completely determined: these children reached together and returned together — about half of the original number. Most of them were about ten or twelve years old, but two girls of eight years old also courageously joined them. They clearly felt that they had accomplished a feat and were very proud later that they participated in such a deed on an equal footing with their elders.
Shortly before the end of the road, everyone accepted the test: the boys howled and frightened because of the roadside bushes. Although their appearance was known in advance, they still made the right impression, and then joined the company.
Finally, they arrived. Ahead, a wide road ran across, and behind it stood the big trees of a dark cemetery, already plunging into the night. On the other side of the road, everything was so severe and majestic that the mere idea that you could go there to tell stupid scary stories seemed ridiculous and even blasphemous.
Everyone started looking around for a place to stay. It was felt that it was necessary to find some place and there to decide what to do next. This place was a large shallow hole surrounded by bushes. Apparently, there was once the foundation of the gatehouse. The children squatted in it. It was clear that no one wanted to go to the cemetery. There was a feeling that with the arrival at this place, an important and, perhaps, the main part of the campaign ended: those who were not mature enough were weeded out, and it became clear who could claim membership in the main part of the Bar-Sloboda children’s community as an «initiate».
It is not known whether the children would have remained in this pit to tell terrible stories or would soon have moved home, just sitting there and feeling the proximity of the cemetery, if we had not gone with them — two students of the folklore expedition and I. We made the children a little excited with our ardent desire to listen to scary stories, and the storytellers were quickly found. After the third or fourth story, everyone suddenly and somehow felt at once how well we were sitting and how great everything was happening — “as it should”: almost a real night, a cemetery is darkening nearby, creating an exciting background, a wide bright road clearly separates the two worlds — otherworldly mysteriously gloomy cemetery and ours, where in a pit, protected on all sides by bushes, an honest company comfortably settled down. Everyone sits close, feels each other’s warmth, takes turns telling amazing stories in low voices and experiences a growing sense of intimate affection for each other, interest, attention and community.
These stories lasted no more than an hour and a half, but it seemed that half the night had passed. We got back so quickly that it was strange — why was it so slow to get to this cemetery at the beginning?
The next day and the following two weeks, the children’s conversations were connected in one way or another with the evening hike. Everyone remembered very well who had gone from where and who «was with us.» Of course, the campaign was a group test: some confirmed their authoritative position and significance, others actually underwent an initiation ceremony.
In addition, the second goal was achieved, which is so important for the organizer girl: joint experience and overcoming fear, common strong impressions, and then memories of the events noticeably rallied the whole company. Relations between the children who participated in the trip to the cemetery became closer, friendlier and more caring. And this whole company acquired a special attraction for those children who were not with them and now dreamed about how they would go there next year.
It was also clear that the events that really took place, the further, the more they become the occasion for various incredible stories, where the wishful thinking was passed off as real, everything was greatly exaggerated, a lot of fantasies — but none of the real participants not only did not protest against this, but vice versa — took an active part in the dissemination of fantastic versions. The event turned into a group myth that the children needed.
It is interesting that everyone quickly forgot that they never reached the cemetery. Therefore, in further memoirs, this story appeared under the title «How we told scary stories in the cemetery.» The formal accuracy of the transmission of the specific events of that evening did not really have much psychological significance — the truth of children’s emotional experiences was important, and here they were close to the truth.
The sketch of visits to «scary places» would be incomplete without mentioning a place that is scary for many children, but where all children visit several times a day. This is a restroom.
If we talk about latrines that cause greater or lesser fears in almost all children, then these are traditional country and village wooden houses with a “point” or the same latrines with many “seats” in children’s summer camps.
With the «terrible places» described in this work, such a restroom has several characteristic features in common.
Firstly, all children (and many adults) are afraid to fall into it and never get out. From the point of view of an adult, this fear has very real grounds in view of the usual fragility of these structures, disproportionately large holes and the frightening perspective that is visible through these holes. But in a child, natural fears of this kind are reinforced by deeper experiences of early age, which have almost magical power. The fact is that for younger children, any restroom, including a home water closet, is a place that causes some tension and anxiety. One source of this anxiety is the way the parents used to potty train the child. Another lies in the peculiarities of children’s thinking.
When young children sit on the potty, they perceive the result of their efforts as a detached part of themselves. Therefore, they, as a rule, are not indifferent to what happens to it next. They are keenly interested in the discharge of water, which carries everything into the black hole of the sewer. This process is experienced by children as a model of what might happen to them if they fall into the toilet. At the same time, the child is not aware of the size discrepancy — this fact does not matter to him. The child is fascinated by the action itself.
Therefore, in younger children, there is often a fear even of the toilet, and it cannot be compared with the horror of the toilet with a «glass».
This fear, being typical, found its reflection in children’s folklore. Among the traditional scary stories, there is a story about how black hands protruded from a pot in a school toilet and dragged those sitting into a hole. So many students of this school disappeared, who were released one by one to the restroom from the lesson.
No wonder, as it should be in relation to the «terrible place», children prefer to go to the restroom in a company. Often this trip has a code name in the children’s language and is a whole ritual.
Secondly, the village restroom is related to other “terrible places” by the presence there of a frightening, spontaneous and disgusting life that is actively going on below: the gurgling, stirring of the vile creatures inhabiting this abyss, in whose power the child is so afraid to be.
Thirdly, the latrine is a secluded place, borderline, not inhabited by people, but marked by the presence of terrible creatures even in the cubicle where the child enters: there you can meet in abundance thick cross-spiders spreading their webs, heavily buzzing blue flies, wasp nests attached to the lintel. Wherever you turn, you will encounter some petty but belligerent owner of this place, and the person who is located in the lavatory turns out to be completely defenseless at a certain moment.
In general, one gets the impression that the increased unattractiveness of our latrines and the abundance of frightening details of their internal structure, even in domestic village latrines, where it is so easy to put everything in order, are due not only to the low everyday culture of the population. It seems that they are also connected with a different symbolic attitude towards this institution than, for example, in the West. The general logic of this relationship (by the way, reminiscent of a child’s one) looks something like this: the place where base needs are sent, in fairness, must correspond to them with its appearance, that is, like is combined with like here.
All this together is the reason why children usually do not like and are afraid to go to the country restroom and prefer to arrange their own latrines near the fence or behind the bushes, which they prefer to visit in the company of friends of their own sex.