In this chapter, we will consider how children are included in an active material interchange with the outside world, and above all with the earth.
Due to their small stature, a child is literally closer to the ground than an adult. And psychologically, the child is also inclined to show more interest and attention to everything on earth.
Let’s start with the fact that children quite often drop various objects and fall themselves. This living meaning makes them imbued with the great idea that it gives support to everything standing and lying on the ground, is the support and final point of the movement of all bodies: there is nowhere to fall further than the earth.
However, the urban child in our culture is taught from an early age by parents that what falls on the ground becomes dirty, inedible, and sometimes even untouchable. Forbidden «no one’s» item lying on the road. But even “one’s own” thing from the “clean” category, having inadvertently found itself on the ground, most often acquires a different status. (Usually these are food and objects with which the child comes into contact with the mouth: a whistle, a straw for soap bubbles, etc. — or with the face, for example, a handkerchief). The fallen object is alienated from its owner and passes into another category, the category of “things lying on the ground. Adults inspire the child that contact with them is dangerous. Therefore, everything connected with the earth is colored for the child by conflicting feelings.
The earth always gives support, and at the same time, sometimes it can hurt you to hit it. The earth is a constant source of interesting finds, but many of them are forbidden or semi-forbidden (therefore, they are especially attractive to the self-assertive little personality).
The earth is not allowed to be touched with bare hands or to pick up something edible from it, while the adults themselves inspire the child to search for mushrooms and berries growing on the ground or on the ground. They also build sandboxes for children, where you can dig as much as you like.
As children dig in the ground from a very young age, they learn first hand that the ground is also a storehouse. You can dig something interesting out of the ground and, conversely, bury it and hide it. Plants come out of the ground, hiding their roots in it. And in the ground they bury those living that became dead. (All parents are well aware of the childhood passion for burying dead creatures: frogs run over by a bicycle wheel, dead birds found by children, etc.)
The earth is also a grandiose surface for children, on which everything that exists in the world is placed, laid out, revealed. Moreover, most of the buildings, plants, all kinds of objects on earth are firmly established — they are large, heavy, occupy their rightful places in the organized space of the surrounding world. But among the many objects according to certain rules on the surface of the earth, there is a category of small «lawless comets» that, by the will of fate, appeared on the road of life unexpectedly. These are things lost by someone, coins, buttons, badges, brooches, earrings, fragments of colored glass, multi-colored bottle caps pressed into the ground, strange pieces of iron, fragments and other rubbish. For adults, all this is life’s rubbish, not worth attention or even causing irritation.
Children treat this rubbish differently. For them, it is something like minerals. As is known, the diversity and abundance of minerals determines the material resources of an ethnic group living in a given territory. It is the same with children — what is found on the street regularly replenishes the stocks of play materials necessary to ensure the vital interests of the child. Among the many small objects lying on the road, the trained eye of a child habitually notices everything that is in the slightest degree of interest. The most valuable items are instantly picked up and hidden in a pocket. So they get a second life. Their further fate can be very diverse. It all depends on how old the child is, what gender he is, with whom and what he plays. The objects found by the child can replenish his «treasury» or become the contents of the «secret» of the girl and the «hidden» of the boy. Something will be used for games, and something, according to children’s concepts, is a hard currency or a worthy object of exchange relations. Possession of some items is a matter of prestige and even affects the position of the child in the peer group. However, such a utilitarian attitude towards finds is typical for children of primary school age; children are big enough. Surprisingly, the smaller the child, the less he is driven by pragmatics — the desire for usefulness, which is formed as a result of social learning. In the behavior of younger children, the influence of deeper, basic laws of development, determined by the very belonging of the child to the human race, is more noticeable, laws through which the essence of the child as a person is revealed. One of the essential properties of a person is his desire to endow events with meaning. From the point of view of the manifestation of this ability, one can consider the behavior of children of three to five years old in relation to the «litter» under their feet.
What parent of young children has not experienced this situation?
— Ma, look what little thing is lying around (picks up). I want to take it!
— Why do you need it?
— Well just…
What kind of «things» attract the attention of the little ones? It would seem that such nonsense, which an older child does not covet.
“On the street, I collected crooked pieces of iron, branches of an unusual shape, something similar. I wrapped all this in burdock and hid it somewhere. Nothing could be brought into the house. I also really liked colored papers, but I didn’t even dare to pick them up from the ground.
The early stage of children’s gathering is striking in that the «things» raised by the child usually have no consumer value, even for himself. They attract the attention of the child by the individual features of their shape, color, substance, or by a vague resemblance to something obscure. The central point of this situation is the very act of discovery: the child saw the “little thing” in the loneliness of its self, singled it out among the universal existence as something remarkable, different from the rest, and decided to include it in the sphere of its own being. The “thing” raised from the ground becomes one of the building elements of the symbolic system of the “I” of the child himself. He affirms himself for himself through the strange objects belonging to him, the main value of which lies in the fact that they are individual and independently obtained in a free search among other matter of the surrounding world. Having made these objects his own, the child has already taken the first step towards endowing their existence with a new meaning coming from a person. The next step usually consists in the child giving them names and making them the heroes of a symbolic world of which he himself is the creator and steward. Let’s remember how the swimming beetles, which the girl caught and settled at home in the bank, got their names, or how, in her favorite grove on the shore of the bay, another girl gave names to all the paths. Here we are dealing with a model, amazing in its visual simplicity, of how a child realizes his human mission as the creator of the world in which he lives, and brings there a meaning that illuminates everything with a new light.
The laws of the development of a human being force each child at a certain moment to independently begin the grandiose work of comprehending the world around him and himself. All children do this in their own way, but they follow approximately the same path, in which it is very desirable for them to meet a wise adult companion who can become a spiritual mentor. If this is not found, the little person will still wander on, obeying the laws of spiritual development common to all people. Only moving forward will be painfully difficult for him.
The problems of such a loner were wonderfully described by Andrei Platonov in the story «The Pit». His hero, an adult child named Voshchev, suffered from the fact that «everything lives and endures in the world, conscious of nothing», «everything indulged in an unrequited existence, only Voshchev separated himself and was silent.»
The adult Voshchev had a childlike habit of picking up strange objects on the road: «Voshchev would sometimes bend down and pick up a pebble, as well as other clumped dust, and put it in his pants for storage.» These pebbles, ashes, leaves became companions for Voshchev on the road of life. By the example of their existence, they helped Voshchev understand how to live on, and Voshchev himself, as a person, felt the responsibility of his mission in relation to them.
“Voshchev picked up a withered leaf and hid it in the secret compartment of the bag …“ You had no meaning in life <...> lie here, I will find out why you lived and died. Since no one needs you and you are lying around in the middle of the whole world, then I will keep and remember you.
This literary hero and the child are related by the fact that they are both going through that stage of personality formation, when a person has already stood out from the “unrequited existence” of the world around him and began to feel like a spiritualized self, but has not yet established conscious and correct relations with this world, although he feels that the initiative should come from him as a person. He began to feel that he was a subject, an active person, having the separateness of personal being. Because of this, he is opposed to the multiple wholeness of the rest of the world, but at the same time he is involved in it, being inside it.
Like is known by like. As the reader will remember from the previous chapters, between the ages of two and five, the child goes through the stage of formation of personal autonomy, gradually discovering his separation from his mother and the ability to act independently. If his development is carried out without interference, then by the end of this period the child should form an inner conviction that «I am» and «I can.» The shadow side of this positive acquisition is a deep experience of the loneliness of individual existence, which the child periodically begins to feel in himself and intuitively recognize in the life around him on the models available to him. One of these models is «things» that have fallen out of the usual circle in which they had their place, and now lying on the road restless. (By the way, even the word “thing” itself turns out to be a speaker here. It comes from the German root “stuk” — “piece”. That is, a “thing” is a piece of something that has separated from the whole and began to lead an independent existence as a separate object.) .
Faced with the problem of being lonely «things», the consciousness of an adult, especially if he is prone to philosophizing like the hero of A. Platonov’s story, could get bogged down in this topic for a long time.
But a normal child, being, in my opinion, an intuitive philosopher by nature, usually does not suffer from «philosophical intoxication.» He quickly translates the thought into action, and the egocentric nature of young children makes them take care of themselves first of all, mobilizing all internal and external resources for this.
Therefore, the child makes a move that achieves two goals at once. Lost in the big world «things» he cleans up, introducing them into the orbit of his own interests. In this way, the child expands its boundaries and «fattens» itself with these and material symbols of the «I» — «a lot of it is being done.» At the same time, “things” acquire value and meaning to the extent that the child wants to own them and include them in his experiences and fantasies.
Approximately after five years (terms are conditional) children’s gathering acquires new features. The child has his own «treasury» (this is not my term, but a children’s name). It is usually kept at home. For girls, this is a box, casket or bag where personal “treasures” are located. Boys love to carry everything they have with them, and their own pocket often plays the role of a “treasury”. The main part of the “treasures” are small items found by a child on the street: beads, badges, broken brooches, beautiful buttons, rare coins and objects of completely incomprehensible origin and purpose, attracting attention precisely because of their strangeness. The “treasury” may also contain gift items, inherited from the elders or exchanged from other children. It is important to note that items purchased from the store are not placed there.
Children of five to seven years old treat their “treasury” with trepidation: this is really something very personally significant and connected with hidden emotional experiences — intimate. This is not something to brag about to others, as is the case with the collections of older children. Showing «treasures» even to the closest people — parents — is a kind of sacrament. It often occurs at the initiative of interested parents who want to join the hidden values of their children. The child yields to their desires, but at the same time carefully and jealously follows the reaction of adults — God forbid, they will somehow belittle or underestimate what is so dear to the child.
But usually the child prefers to communicate with his «treasures» in private, so that no one interferes: he examines them, admires, fantasizes.
Children perceive their «treasures» very sensually, they like the very flesh of these gizmos: rich colors, iridescent shades in depth, an unusual shape, especially its curves, smoothness, brilliance, small size, which allows you to completely hide the object in your fist — as if inside yourself, his own flesh.
In almost all girls’ «treasuries» there is an object resembling a magic crystal. According to the stories of my elderly informants, Russian girls of the middle class in the late 50th and early XNUMXth centuries had, for example, small faceted testicles made of colored glass. For Soviet girls of the XNUMXs, to whose generation I belong, the same role was played by fragments of colored glasses or perfume bottles. In those days, it was fashionable to make colored inserts into the complex binding of the windows of the verandas in the country, and in the summer all the children hunted for trimmings and fragments of cherry, yellow and dark blue glasses, through which they then looked at the white light, and kept them, taking the smallest ones to treasure city. In winter, they became a source of nostalgic memories of a wonderful summer. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, times have changed, but even now finding a beautiful fragment of a perfume bottle is a joyful event for most little girls.
We emphasize the word “find”: I walked and walked and found — I stumbled, stepped, saw a gift of fate lying under my feet, waiting for you, an unexpected, but welcome surprise. But how easy it would be to get a lot of fragments at once and choose the best of them, if you take and specially break some bottle from the garbage heap. But this is never done even by those children who live near deposits of potential «treasures», for example, not far from the dump of a perfume factory. After all, this is a dishonest, artificial way of extracting what should come to the child in a completely different, natural way — in the form of a chance meeting.
Here the child rejects in himself the voluntaristic desire to independently obtain what he wants in order to realize another, apparently more valuable for him, opportunity to acquire a wonderful gift.
The hope for unexpected joy, for receiving gifts that fate from time to time sends to a person for nothing, just like that, from their generosity — this is one of the main principles of the intuitive life philosophy of children, which can be traced in many other situations. He supports in the child faith in the grace of life and the desire to live on. Such an attitude brings an element of joyful expectation into human existence, makes life interesting, full of small miracles.
(It is amazing that the great vital role of unexpected joy can be traced at different stages of the evolutionary ladder of the inhabitants of the Earth.
So, Karen Pryor, a well-known American animal behavior researcher and specialist in their training, writes about how important it is for a trained animal to sometimes get a jackpot. Kush is a very attractive and large one-time reward that the trainee receives as an unexpected gift, and not as another payment for good work. Getting a jackpot sharply raises the mood of the animal and its desire to be active and try to complete the next tasks of a person. Kush has a particularly inspiring effect on animals that are tired and distrustful of their abilities, who have not succeeded in this or that exercise for a long time)
The same childish principle, but already professed in the form of a conscious worldview concept, we find among believing adults. Like children, they put in the first place not the willfulness of a person who provides for himself, but the Providence of God about a person, when the All-Good, Almighty Providence himself sends a person everything that is truly necessary. In adults, this principle is briefly summarized in the formula «God will send.»
The child and the believing adult here are united by a common conviction in the initial love of the Creator of the world for man and his obligatory response to the needs of man.
In situations with finds on the street, a combination of polar attitudes, typical for children, also attracts attention. As we said in the previous chapter, this is, on the one hand, the basic need for stability, immutability, constancy of the world in which the child lives, and on the other hand, a passionate love for surprises and miracles. True, if you look at the children more closely, you will notice that, being sure of the first, they are ready to accept the second.
So, what is a “treasury”, how does it differ from twigs and pieces of iron wrapped in burdock? Burdock is the forerunner of the «treasury». A “treasury” is, literally and figuratively, a repository of a child’s personal values.
In material terms, this is a special closed container, inaccessible to other people, where small items found or received as a gift by a child are stored, i.e. belonging to him personally and perceived by him as values.
In spiritual terms, in each of the objects of the «treasury» experiences, memories, and fantasies that are dear to the child are materialized. The child periodically revives them, communicating with his «treasures» as with magical objects. Each of these objects becomes, for the child, a small independent world. It can be said that «treasures» are the materialized spiritual values of the child — a materialized infantile prototype of that innermost part of the soul where a person stores the most important thing.
Children’s «treasury» exists for several years, and then quietly disappears. Much later, some people discover the remains of their childhood «treasures» accidentally preserved among other household trifles — in caskets with buttons, badges, old coins — then they evoke vague, amazing memories. For other people, everything disappears without a trace and is completely forgotten, as if nothing had happened.
After six or seven years, a new type of children’s collecting appears — collecting. The collection first exists parallel to the «treasury», and then gradually replaces it. The differences between them lie in the principles of combining the material.
The selection of «treasures» is determined by the individual, emotional and personal meaning that each little thing has for the child. This meaning is secret: it is not really realized by the child himself, just as it is impossible to fully decipher it to an outsider. It will forever remain a personal secret.
A collection is always based on some, albeit imperfect, intellectual and logical principle of material selection. It is systematized according to some features. The tendency to such systematization is one of the manifestations of a new, more perfect stage in the development of logical thinking, which occurs in children after the age of seven. If the “treasury” is individual, then the collection is social and is more determined by external factors related to the child’s life in a group of peers: fashion, prestige, rivalry, exchange relations, etc. Therefore, children show collections to each other with pleasure, show off, are proud of them. What in the «treasury» was a purely personal spiritual value, in the collection becomes a social value and even has a material value. In this sense, the collection is a “secularized” “treasury”, in which the accumulative and outwardly demonstrative (in everyday language — ostentatious) beginning is strengthened.
The very appearance of the collection indicates that the child has entered a new phase of socialization in the children’s subculture, usually associated with the beginning of school life. This is the phase of active formation of an independent experience of life “in the world”, in the midst of people, when the child learns to obey the rules of group life, learns generally accepted patterns of behavior in accordance with the everyday requirements of the social environment in which he lives. This is the period when the deep spiritual life of the child, which previously easily found individual expression in fantasies and games, collides with the pressure, influence and temptations that exist in the bowels of the child’s society.
On the one hand, this influence is constructive and positive, in particular, because children tend to unite for a joint, and therefore more effective solution to their common age-related problems. In this sense, the children’s cultural tradition that is passed down from generation to generation of children, which will be discussed below, helps.
On the other hand, for many reasons that we will not discuss now, the children’s society is often aggressively authoritarian in relation to the individual, forcing him to follow fairly strict generally accepted children’s standards of behavior. In particular, they manifest themselves in the way children’s forms of ownership (which include collections) are associated in the collective consciousness of children with the social status of the child in the peer group.
If adults do not interfere in the process of children’s spontaneous collecting, then children of seven to ten years old usually collect items that can be obtained without money, but this is not easy to do, since these items are relatively rare and difficult to obtain. In this regard, the collections of Soviet children from the 30s and 60s are typical. With the then general poverty, the collector of candy wrappers, for example, had little hope that he would ever get a candy in the desired beautiful wrapper. He relied more on his ability to notice this candy wrapper lying around some urn, on his social dexterity, which will allow him to quietly save the wrapper from a candy eaten during a decorous tea party at someone’s luxurious birthday, etc. Many children never never in my life did they eat expensive (and therefore rarely bought by anyone) sweets with beautiful complex pictures on wrappers, sweets like Little Red Riding Hood, Gulliver, Morning in a Pine Forest. But they knew perfectly well the price of such a candy wrapper when exchanging it for others, just as people today know the ratio of exchange rates, since candy wrappers were not only an object of collection, but also the main element of the children’s gambling game «wrappers». This knowledge was included in the system of children’s customary law, which concerned, in particular, the regulation of exchange relations between children. (The first detailed work on this topic was published in 1997 by V. V. Golovin.)
In children’s spontaneous collecting, as described above, the material of the collection is perceived by children as the personal prey of its owner. The number and rarity of objects that a child possesses testify to the high development of socially valuable qualities in him, from the point of view of the children’s community, thanks to which he got what he has. Adults living in subsistence farming think about the same: whoever brings more meat and skins is the best hunter and, accordingly, a respected person. Here is a modern example from a child’s life:
“The railroad, which passed not far from the house, was considered a rather dangerous place. But I specifically went there with others in defiance of my parents, so I overcame the parental ban. I was ten years old. On the railroad, we were busy putting coins on the rails. When an electric train passed over the coin, it became flatter. The more such flat coins someone had, the higher was the significance of this child in the group.
So, again, the picture familiar to us: children are trying to materialize themselves — now not just the fact of their existence, as the little ones do, but their known and tested capabilities — in the objects that they get. Having overcome dangers, having shown the necessary qualities of a hunter, children get objects in which their strengths are symbolically embodied. The new age point here is that other children belonging to the same group also understand the symbolic meaning of these things as evidence of the potential possibilities of their owner. In almost every children’s company there is a certain class of especially valuable items that are not bought, but mined. Possession of them affects the status of the child in this group and the attitude towards him. These items are a symbolic expression of the socio-psychological potential of their owner as a member of the children’s community.
The intervention of adults in spontaneous children’s collecting can be direct and indirect. The direct influence of adults is usually expressed in their desire for children to collect objects of value from the point of view of an adult, as well as in their desire to give this collection a system and introduce an informative and educational component into it. Usually, adults do not understand enough the psychological reasons for the children’s desire for collecting, which we talked about above.
The indirect influence of adults on children’s collecting is that the world of adult business uses the psychological characteristics of younger students, which determine their interest in collecting. For example, for commercial purposes, advertising artificially shapes and inflates children’s passion for collecting pictures and stickers, which are produced in series. Even if we omit the question of the low level of their artistic performance, the main problem remains. It consists in the fact that all this is purchased, and therefore entails undesirable consequences.
Firstly, the choice of collectible objects is not made by the children themselves in accordance with their psychological needs, but is persistently imposed on them from the outside with the help of advertising. This is nothing more than a gooey manipulation of the minds of children, all the more dangerous because the mind of a child is in a state of formation and it is during this age period that it is especially susceptible to the influence of social standards.
Second, money is involved. Mined and purchased are fundamentally different things. If the quality of prey is determined by the personal abilities of the child-provider, then the quantity and quality of what is bought depends very much on the financial capabilities of his parents. This is how a significant psychological substitution occurs: personal resources lose their significance in comparison with monetary resources.
But the child’s consciousness often does not notice this substitution. It continues to directly connect the qualities of the owner with the abundance and quality of the objects belonging to him, in much the same way that adults sometimes, contrary to obvious facts, think that a person who is beautiful on the outside must be beautiful in soul. The child gradually begins to distinguish the complex dialectic of the relationship between the external and the internal in a person in different social situations after the age of nine or ten, and the understanding of this dialectic comes later, after many years.
In general, the emphasis on the purchase of collectibles emasculates the important psychological aspects that are present in children’s natural collecting, and deprives it of some deep meanings. Adults who make a business out of a child’s passion for collecting are usually pursuing their own interests. By shaping the psychology of consumers in children, they are prepared to become worthy members of the mass consumer society in the future.
Let’s get back to earth. In addition to the objects that replenish the «treasuries» and collections, children find on the earth many more useful things and materials that provide for a variety of children’s needs.
The most common finds are money. Because children look at the ground from a closer distance and more attentively than adults, they find more. There are children who almost every walk bring either a coin or a paper bill. Children of preschool — primary school age usually give the money found to their parents or, at the insistence of their parents, put it in a piggy bank. They like to feel like earners, contributing to the family budget, and receive praise for their attentiveness.
Another thing is if the children have discovered a place that becomes a constant source of replenishment of pocket money. Most often, such places are interested in and ingeniously find their older children, nine or eleven years old, who already know well what money can be spent on. Even if these are places of legal, and not illegal, extraction of money, children try not to advertise them either at home or among their peers.
In my childhood, for my girlfriend and I, such a gold mine was a place on the corner of our house, where there was an institution called «Beer — Water». Near the entrance there was a tray on wheels, from which they sold sweets — by the piece. All this colorful goods lay on a tray with prices that ranged from one to six kopecks (this was in the early 60s), and we quite often stood at the tray for a long time, looking at and choosing sweets. That’s when we noticed that many buyers drop money there. In drunkards, coins fell out of trembling fingers, young men considered it beneath their dignity to bend down for a penny, mothers with small children did not want to get their hands dirty and rummage in the mud if a coin rolled under the tray.
We were returning from the square from an evening walk just after seven o’clock, when the trade was over. Having let the nanny and my younger sister go around the corner of the house, my friend and I looked under the tray, where the rounded coins were clearly visible in the light of the beer shop windows, chose them from there as quickly as possible so as not to attract anyone’s attention, and, satisfied, always with a profit, they ran after the nanny, who did not notice anything. Money was always spent immediately: for sweets that were bought from the same stall the next day, sometimes for shooting at a shooting range — a shot cost two kopecks, and for the cheapest ice cream — milk for nine kopecks — they were usually not enough. It is interesting that this money was never saved up and spent on something from which there were no material traces left: they ate it, shot it — zilch! This went on for a year and a half, while the tray stood. We really enjoyed the experience of our financial independence, although we were not at all destitute — our parents always gave a change for specific expenses.
In addition to money, children collect various fragments and gizmos during walks, which they then use as play materials. In my collection there is a lovely eyewitness account of how my sister, a five-year-old housekeeping girl, and her three-year-old brother loved to play “at a party”. For cutlery, they had a half of a real deep plate found in the bushes, and an aluminum spoon from the garbage, carefully wiped by its new owners. The guests, among whom was the mother of the children, were treated to fresh snow, which they ate with a spoon for real — the reception came in the courtyard in the open air in winter.
A child can turn a fragment into an independent play object, giving it new functions — let’s recall an example already familiar to the reader: a handle from an old cup found in a garbage dump turns into a pendant when hung on a string. Equally, this fragment can be included as one of the elements in a new construction created by the child, for example, become part of the “secret” (they will be discussed a little later).
Girls always look at wreckage as objects with which something can be done — i.e. put them at your service, adapt their qualities to your goals. But it is completely unusual for girls to perceive them as a substance that can be included in a chain of chemical transformations by acting on it with fire. We can say that girls think objectively and are not at all inclined to alchemy. They do not try to penetrate, as boys often do, into the very flesh of things, making transformations in their composition. But the boys will not miss the opportunity to throw something they found into the fire and watch how it catches fire, explodes, melts. Passion for chemical reactions at primary school age is almost always the business of boys. From research, they quickly move on to creative practice, when, for example, having collected old batteries from a landfill, they smelt lead out of them at the stake in order to make sinkers, bits, lead, etc. for themselves.
Girls, on the other hand, very rarely happen when they really cook something on fire in the game. Most often, their make-believe soup in a toy saucepan consists of flower heads floating in cold water, petals and finely chopped grass. Girls try to make it all look beautiful. Aesthetics is important in the preparation of such a soup. This is a design process, the organization of a beautiful whole from the elements, but not chemistry.
It seems that boys, by their nature, endure the spectacle of how an object loses its shape and structure in the process of aggressive action on it, when the pressure of force turns it into just a heap of matter, chaotic nothingness. Therefore, participation in destructive actions in relation to objects does not become such an acutely painful emotional experience for boys as it does for girls.
A significant moment for boys is the feeling of their own power over the substance of the objective world and the simultaneous disclosure of the secret forces of matter that come out when the former object shell is destroyed and the essential transformation of the very flesh of the object begins. The death of any structure is always accompanied by a release of energy that was contained in it and held this structure. The energy released by the destruction of the object bursts out like a genie from a bottle and creates a powerful force field for a moment, which is very attractive to the boys. No wonder they like the ringing, roaring, crackling of broken bottles, exploding firecrackers or violent chemical reactions. All these are external manifestations of strength that the boy needs to experience and master. What he does is equally exploring both the forces hidden in objects and in his own body (cf. boyish competitions in the range of throws, spitting, in the power of the urine stream, etc.).
It cannot be said that the theme of strength is alien to girls. It’s just that the forces that attract girls are somewhat different than those that fascinate boys. In accordance with their natural structure, as future mothers, girls (without realizing it) are more sensitive not to centrifugal forces rushing outward, but to hidden centripetal forces concentrating inside the object. These are the forces with which an object or a person is filled and powerful, which strengthen its internal structure, becoming a source of its growth and development. And in them, these inner forces, girls and women know a lot and know how to use them.
Women usually try not to flaunt their own strengths, hiding their main reserves. Men, on the contrary, tend to declare their strength openly, to show it to the fullest and be proud of it.
Differences between boys and girls are combined with a simultaneous age similarity in their behavior. This similarity is due to the fact that all children in the process of their mental and personal development solve the same problems, but do it in slightly different ways. This is clearly shown in the remarkable children’s tradition, which will now be discussed.
We have already mentioned in passing that many attractive objects picked up by children on the street become the contents of girlish «secrets» and boyish «stashes». Now it is time to talk about this in detail.
The “secret” (or “secret”) of a girl is a small hole a few centimeters deep, specially dug in the ground. Its bottom is carefully laid out with something beautiful. Usually, a background is made first: for example, leaves from a tree, on which interesting “tricks” are placed on top, flower heads, a twig with acorns, etc. The contents of the “secret” are far from always of plant origin. In the classic «secrets» of experienced girls of seven or eight years, the background of colored foil is most valued. The foil is prepared ahead of time. It can be found on the street, or it can be brought from home. On top of the foil, a complex arrangement is made of fragments of colored glass, bottle caps, beads, buttons, pictures, figures molded from plasticine. In general, the contents of the «secret» can be anything. The main thing is that all this should be interesting and beautifully arranged. From above, the composition is covered with a piece of transparent glass, thoroughly washed in the nearest puddle. (It is not easy to obtain such glass, so the unexpected discovery of a suitable shard of window glass can in itself be an incentive to create a “secret.”) It turns out something like a window in the ground, through which Beauty is mysteriously shimmering due to the glare of foil. Then the glass is covered with a thin layer of earth, so that when viewed from the outside, nothing is noticeable. Therefore, girls often try to somehow mark for themselves the location of the “secret”, so that later it can be found.
Usually a girl has several such “secrets” (on average 3-5, sometimes more), and she periodically visits them. Then the ground above the “secret” is cleared, so that under the cover glass the “beauty” hidden in the depths is visible. They admire it, correct it if something has gone bad, and bury it again. The life of such a “secret” is from several hours to a couple of weeks. Most often, he dies from the destructive actions of enemies, sometimes from natural disasters, and sometimes at the hands of the mistress herself, if she is tired of him. Then she again makes the “secret”, even more beautiful than before.
The creation of «secrets» is a tradition of children’s subculture. This means that both the idea itself and the forms of its implementation and even the name “secret” are passed from older children to younger ones in the form of cultural heritage. Each successive generation of little girls reproduces what the previous generation did, and so on until the tradition fades away. Why did most girls aged five or six to eight or nine either make «secrets» themselves, or at least watch others do them? Apparently, this tradition is preserved because the making of «secrets» turned out to be a successful form of satisfying some important needs of the child, which are actualized at this age.
I have been collecting material about “secrets” since the late 1970s: I made sketches of the “secrets” of many girls, I asked children questions about what the “secrets” are for. My research allows now to sum up some results and answer the question: why does this children’s tradition exist?
It turned out that «secrets» have several important functions in a child’s life.
Firstly, they are undoubtedly one of the mass forms of children’s design creativity. The uniqueness of «secrets» as artistic creations of children lies in the fact that they are completely outside the zone of aesthetic control of adults. It doesn’t even occur to parents that these miserable pits with all sorts of rubbish covered with glass, pits in the mud under the benches in the park, or at the roots of a tree, or against the wall of the house can be considered as someone’s artistic product. Usually parents don’t see them at all, and it’s not for nothing that these are “secrets”. I think that — fortunately for children, This saves them from adult interference, imposing ideas about how it is necessary and how it is not necessary, what is beautiful and what is not. Almost no kind of children’s creativity that is accessible to the contemplation of adults avoids such an authoritarian invasion. (By the way, it should be said that the children’s «secrets» were not noticed by those adult professionals who, on duty, should pay attention to them — ethnographers, artist-educators, psychologists.)
The aesthetic aspect of the «secret» is very important for a girl. Indeed, by making a “secret”, a child consciously creates Beauty, and in his creation, primordially childish ideas about beauty are clearly visible. To an attentive observer, the «secret» will tell about children’s aesthetic preferences, features of design thinking, principles of composition organization. And all this is primordial, sincere, done for oneself and other children without regard to the artistic authorities of adults.
The next important aspect of the existence of «secrets» is related to the fact that they are all located outside the home, at different points in the external space where the child is. This very fact indicates the possible role of «secrets» in children’s territorial behavior. And right.
My student N. G. Putyatova investigated the territorial behavior of a children’s yard company in one of the central districts of St. Petersburg. She tried to map the locations of the «secrets» of individual children and compare them with the degree to which the child mastered these territorial zones. It turned out that these children tended to make their «secrets» in two types of zones.
Most of the «secrets» were grouped in highly socialized places, as mastered by the children’s community. For example, under the benches surrounding the central square of the square, where all the children of this microdistrict walked after school.
But also «secrets» could be located where, on the contrary, the child rarely visited — on the borders of the developed territory, where the already alien, unexplored land begins.
I think that such placement of «secrets» is determined by their deep connection with the personality of the child himself. By making a «secret», the child actually materializes his secret presence in the given place. He puts a piece of his soul into the «secret» and makes it his representative in two significant zones of the developed territory — in its social center and at its borders. Periodic visits and checks by the child of his «secrets» revive the symbolic connection between the «I» of the child and its incarnation in its creation, between the signifier and the signifier. It can be said that the making of “secrets” is one of the many forms of children asserting their presence in the developed territory and one of the ways of mastering it through being in the very flesh of the earth, through a kind of growing into the soil.
This suggests a somewhat blasphemous, but reasonable analogy. When a new human settlement arises — a village, a city, a monastery — people begin to feel truly settled, when the first grave appears and a cemetery appears where they settled. It is the buried relatives, part of the family to which the living belong, that firmly connect them with mystical ties to this earth. Then we can also recall the construction victim, who was killed and buried under the foundation of a dwelling under construction, so that it would stand stronger … But this is already the task of ethnographers — to explore the parallel traditions that exist in the secret world of children and the mythological world of adults. And we will move further, adhering to the psychological path, and will consider the third aspect of the existence of a children’s «secret» — its role in children’s communication with each other.
The fact is that the «secret» is revealed to the elect. Usually these are confidants — best friends. The degree of trust in a person is measured, as you know, by the ability to reveal your secrets to him. For younger girls, this literally becomes a procedure for digging out their “secret” so that their beloved friend can look at it. Unfortunately, girls are very changeable in their friendships, and a common type of revenge among former girlfriends is the destruction of each other’s «secrets» (as if — a symbolic murder), as well as betrayal, when someone else’s «secret» is given to the boys, who destroy it.
We have repeatedly emphasized that «secrets» are a woman’s business, a girl’s business. The boys make «hiding places», which will be discussed later. However, «secrets» play an important role in the communication between girls and boys.
In general, there is a small category of boys who are interested in playing with girls. Then they sometimes take part in the making of «secrets», but rather as learners, initiates — in secondary roles. According to the recollections of such boys, they were most surprised and admired by the aestheticism of girls, manifested in the design of the «secret». The girls were taught to carefully smooth out the foil, to select interesting material, to arrange everything neatly and beautifully. For the boys, the very principles of creating a «secret» were excitingly new.
The bulk of the boys see something completely different in the “secrets” of the girls. For them, this is an object of hunting: they want to find a «secret» to ruin it. To the question: “Why do girls make “secrets”?” — the boys usually answer: «So that we can destroy them!» This is what happens in the primary school age of seven or nine years old, when outwardly relations between the sexes sometimes take the form of hostilities against each other, behind the facade of which a true interest in the enemy is hidden. snatching a briefcase and other active attacks, behind which is often the interest, sympathy, or simply the desire of the boy to make direct contact with the girl. From this, quite frequent cases become clear when the girl herself destroys her “secret”, because “for a long time no one found or destroyed it and it became boring.”
Since boys are the same people as girls, their «hiding places» are related to «secrets» by a common function — the desire in this way to materialize their secret presence in the space of the surrounding world. However, boyish «hiding places» are rarely in the ground — only if there is nowhere else to arrange them. In general, they are more often located in all kinds of niches, crevices, shelters, where you can make a container invisible to the prying eye, where various objects are laid.
Sometimes boys hide in a “hiding place” what will later be needed for street play, so that they don’t have to go home for it or that they don’t throw it out of the house, mistaking it for garbage. But much more often in the «cache» there are personally significant, valuable objects for the boy, similar to those stored in the «treasuries». Some of them were found or mined by him. Something — donated by significant people (usually older men: father, uncle, older brother or comrade).
In special cases, for example, in a pioneer camp, in «hiding places» located outside the habitable space, in the forest — under trees or on them, in holes and slopes of ditches, etc. — objects are hidden that can be taken away by the authorities or more a strong peer (food, wearables, items of high consumer value, as well as stolen goods).
It is interesting that in the «hidden places» of boys there is no aesthetic aspect, which is so important for the «secrets» of girls. Very often, the emphasis is shifted to something else: it’s not so important what lies in the cache (sometimes boys suffer because the “cache” is made, but there is nothing to put there), how important it is built (surprise choice of place, invention and technical perfection of the organization of the containers).
Much less than girls’ secrets, a boy’s «cache» is a means of communication. Boys sometimes also show it to their closest friends, but after that it loses its security, and therefore its attractiveness for the owner, who destroys it or transfers it to another place. Girls do not hunt for boyish «hiding places», but their own, boys, yes. If a boy stumbles upon or accidentally discovers a peer’s «hiding place», as my informants reported, he usually defiantly destroys it, leaving it torn apart. Things hidden there are rarely of value to anyone other than the owner. The Destroyer takes them out and throws them nearby. All this is reminiscent of a symbolic duel with the owner of the «hiding place»: if he is discovered and ruthlessly exposed, he must accept death.
Interestingly, the boys often make «hiding places» right in their own house. In the apartment, the cracks under the window sill, recesses in the wall pushed in by something, the space under the removable floorboard, plinth, etc. become their favorite place for them. Girls do this less often, maybe because they usually have separate “treasuries”. For the boy, it turns out to be important to experience that he has his own secrets in the space of the house, which no one guesses about and which are not available to anyone.
What are «treasuries», «secrets» and «caches» from the point of view of the problem of children’s territorial behavior?
Apparently, in this regard, they are a manifestation of the child’s attempts (consecrated by childhood tradition) to establish deep personal contact with the habitat. The establishment of such contact on the part of the child is something like a symbolic dialogue, which is embodied in a hidden material exchange with the environment, in a symbolic exchange of valuable gifts with it. For the child, objects that he takes to his “treasury” become guests from the outside world. And he materializes himself outside in the form of his own authorized representatives: «secrets» hidden in the bowels of the earth, and «hidden places» hidden in the flesh of the surrounding world.