«Ma, can I go for a walk?» In this matter, there is hope, and a hidden fear of failure, and a foretaste of the joy of a walk. Short pause — permission received. A second later, a quick clatter of feet up the stairs can be heard.
“Well, where are you rushing, be careful! To be at home at five! — shouts the mother in pursuit. And she wonders: how can you so passionately strive every day into a shabby yard with a broken swing? After all, everything is familiar like the back of your hand, and there is nothing interesting. True, in the depths of her soul, the mother knows that her child will manage to find something to do everywhere, especially if he is with a friend.
Some adults are indifferent to what their children are doing in the yard. If only they were in the air, returned alive and well and did nothing reprehensible. However, we will do otherwise and now try to take a few walks with the children, remaining inconspicuous, but attentive observers. Let’s observe how the child finds something to do on a walk, and how his games are connected with the characteristics of the environment around him.
When leaving the house, St. Petersburg children are faced with a variety of types of urban space, depending on the area in which they live.
It can be a yard-well with a large garbage dump in the corner, many stray cats and a patch of asphalt lit by the sun, where girls jump rope or play “ball school”, since there is a convenient blank wall there.
Or is it a stunted public garden with several benches, a sandbox and an iron swing for kids. Here you need to show miracles of ingenuity in order to find something worthy of attention.
This may be a typical landscape of new buildings: lifeless, windswept wastelands with craters of unburied holes, wire sticking out of the ground and abandoned concrete slabs.
Or a specially designated place, equipped with fabulous log huts, racks with climbing bars and totem pole-like carvings of fabulous creatures — Baba Yaga, Leshy, Bogatyr.
We will also visit the yards and gardens, which are really good for walking and playing. But first, let’s observe how children find something to do and enjoy life in situations with obviously limited resources or completely unfavorable ones. Let’s start with a live example.
Here is a brother and sister of six and eight years old went for a walk in the deserted snow-covered courtyard of their house, where there is nothing but two squat concrete slides with a steep metal descent. The slides stand side by side, at a distance of a meter from each other. It is winter outside, but the slides are not flooded, because they are not at all adapted for skiing in winter. There is a noticeable gap between the end of the descent and the ground. This place is the most dangerous. If you are awkward and lose your balance, you can hit the ground with your head. The iron rods of the railings and steps of the stairs on the slides are partially broken and stick out in different directions, it’s not worth catching anything on them.
In general, slides are a pitiful sight. For an adult prone to melancholy, they could become a symbol of deep disrespect for a person. These slides seem to be deliberately created in order to deliver as many difficulties and troubles as possible to those who want to ride.
But the children went out to their yard and are going to walk here, since they were let out for a walk, which means that they must take it for granted, agree that the yard is theirs, and the concrete slides are what they are. Let’s try to figure out why the acceptance of the natural inevitability of such a situation is easier for children than for adults? What is behind the amazing adaptability inherent in children, the lack of which adults so often suffer from?
In everyday life, children are almost constantly forced to be and find something to do in situations set by their elders. In general, the conversation with the little one is short: where they put it — sit here, where they put it — stop there, don’t go anywhere from the place where the parents allowed you to walk, etc. It’s more difficult with older children: they have many personal problems due to for the fact that adults are accustomed to take little account of their desires and preferences (these problems were beautifully described by Françoise Dolto in her famous book “On the side of the child”). Therefore, the older the child becomes, the more important it becomes for him to build his own hidden world, where he can dispose of as a master.
The behavior of a brother and sister, two children who went for a walk in a deserted courtyard with concrete slides, is interesting for us as a model for a typically childish solution to the problem of accepting circumstances as given.
So let’s watch these kids. It will even be beneficial for us that children notice the interested looks of adults — this will encourage them to show their best. After all, for a younger child to show himself is, first of all, to show what he can.
The children went out into the street in a cheerful mood: they were let out of the house, on the street the sun, snow, frost. The only decoration of the yard is concrete slides. Children rush to them: since there are slides, we will ride from them.
The first thought that visits the children and predetermines the further course of events is that there are two of them and there are also two slides. So the sister runs up one and the brother runs up the other, and they have a desire to compete. This is a powerful engine of their activity. The sister sets the tone. She is older, she is an inventor, but her brother tries and does not lag behind, constantly looking at her.
Missing steps? All the more interesting — can you quickly run up? Sticking out an iron rod? Learn to maneuver, then you will not be hooked.
The sister invents different ways to slide down the hill, which the brother copies and perfects. It turns out that you can use the gap between the lower edge of the descent and the ground as a small springboard, from which you must famously slide off and land in the snow.
«Look, brother, how can I!» — «And me too!» — «Who is faster?» — «And who is more even to move out and stay on his haunches, and not sit down backwards in the snow?» — such a silent dialogue between brother and sister goes through quick glances, smiles, a demonstrative display of one’s dashing and dexterity to another.
The last achievement is to slide down the slope and stop at the very end of it, holding onto the edges of the slide with your hands. “And I can slow down as I want!”
All available descent possibilities have already been used, and the sister decides to approach the hill from the other end: she runs up the slippery and steep iron slope. A sister can, but a brother can’t. «Look, brother, who’s in charge here!»
Finally, innovations have been exhausted here, it has become boring. The children go down and, in some thought, look for what else they could do with the slides. Since the brother is smaller, he is the first to come up with the idea of crawling through a wide hole in the concrete base of the slide, which the children begin to do, chasing each other.
In the end, having run over, they rise — each to their own hill — and from there, as from the captain’s bridge, they inspect their yard in a businesslike way. The hill is completely mastered, lived and therefore conquered. Her game resource is completely exhausted today. Judging by the contented appearance of the children, they are satisfied with this.
Let’s try to summarize our observations.
First, children take circumstances for granted and are sincerely ready to enter into full contact with what exists here and now, regardless of the unattractiveness and scarcity of this given.
Secondly, children show constant activity in interaction with the object of their interest. The process of a purposeful search for the properties of an object that have a “game value” instantly turns into game actions.
Thirdly, the presence of a peer partner (or group) significantly increases the activity of children, pushes them to a creative search and increases the volume of events taking place.
Although we have drawn these conclusions by observing children in one particular situation, they are not accidental. They reflect the principles of interaction with environmental objects characteristic of children. We will see more than once how these principles manifest themselves in different situations, when children are left to their own devices and act in accordance with their natural impulses.
For example, a ten-year-old boy did not go to the store with his mother, but remained waiting for her at the entrance on the street. He is dissatisfied with the fact that he will have to stand in one place for a long time, he is bored — this is written on his face. He shifts from foot to foot and feels that he is standing on sand, which is densely trampled on the asphalt. The boy immediately begins picking the sand with the toe of his boot, and then, carried away, runs long strips with his welt several times over the sand. At this moment, his gaze finds at the base of the wall a small window into the basement, where the light is on. A niche with a window is fenced off from the sidewalk by a rounded iron handrail. Holding it, the boy carefully peers out the window and watches for a couple of minutes what the people scurrying around in the basement are doing. When it becomes clear to him what the matter is, he hangs on the handrail, legs crossed, feels that the support is strong, and begins to use the handrail as a horizontal bar, performing various body movements. At this time, the boy’s mother comes out of the store, scolds him for misbehaving, and they leave together.
The situation is outwardly different than that of children on the slides, but, as we can see, psychologically the strategies of behavior are similar. In a situation of lack of eventfulness, the child immediately deploys active orienting activity outside.
For an adult, the speed with which a child accepts a forced environment and comes into contact with it is amazing. An adult who is forced into a boring situation (for example, at a bus stop waiting for public transport) usually behaves differently. He tends to show negative emotions: he gets angry, outwardly demonstrates his rejection of the situation and impatience, trying to find support from the same sufferers as he is, sometimes he tries to go to the newspaper that he takes out of his pocket, or plunges into his thoughts. All this is an expression of an active unwillingness to come into contact with what surrounds a person here and now and he does not like it. Unlike a child, the most typical strategy of an adult in a situation of lack of eventfulness is psychological withdrawal into the inner space of his personality.
In his defense, an adult could say that children have nowhere to rush and there is nothing special to do, so they have fun with what catches their eye, and an adult has thoughts in his head that need to be considered, more important things await him than shifting half an hour at the stop. But whatever the justifications, the fact remains that in a forced situation, the child shows a readiness for contact with it, and the typical strategy of an adult’s behavior is to get out of the situation.
If we evaluate the difference between these attitudes on the spiritual plane, then we can say that an adult, to a much greater extent than a child, is inclined to reject the world if he does not like it. For a believer, this attitude indicates a lack of humility, a lack of acceptance of circumstances and events as manifestations of the will of God. And the Protestant unwillingness of a person to make contact with them leads to the loss of the opportunity to understand their deep meaning, which entails a chain of further consequences.
It turns out a paradox. The mental perfection of an adult — the presence of a developed inner world opposed to the outer world, the presence of personal goals, plans and intentions, independence and volitional regulation of behavior — becomes an obstacle to his direct live contacts with the world in many situations and even a brake on the spiritual development of an adult.
And a child, a being in many respects mentally less perfect — with a weak «I», an unformed inner world, with an underdeveloped system of mental regulation, which leads to the fact that his involuntary, «floating» attention is usually taken outward and is easily caught by any new and attractive object, not holding on to anything for a long time — the child, it turns out, has the most important quality that ensures contact with the world and, accordingly, provides sources of development, and thus pleases God more than a clever adult?
We will explore the details of this paradox further by observing children. As for adults, we can say: to whom much has been given, much will be required. At the next round of a person’s personal development, what he achieved at the previous stage is dialectically denied, so that at the next ascent, the rejected is suddenly reborn in the form of a new, more perfect quality. Mature wisdom presupposes, in the words of the poet, «unheard of simplicity», and the humility and meekness of the wise man is a manifestation of his invincible spiritual strength, but not weakness.
The mental capabilities of an adult always allow him to hide from the outside world in the inner space of his «I». But the more mature and wise an adult becomes, the more he strives to reunite with the world: he begins to realize the limitations of his «I» and feel like a small particle of the common being. He gradually comes to the realization of his finiteness and understanding of the surrounding events as life lessons that were given for a reason, i.e. accepts and cognizes his “being-in-the-world”.
Therefore, in personal growth groups, when working with adults who are confused in life and have lost live contact with the world, psychotherapists consistently implement the basic principle of “here and now”. They do not allow a person to immerse himself in his ideas, thoughts, fantasies and thereby avoid contact with reality, but force him to continuously monitor (as is typical for children) the current events taking place at the moment in this situation.
Spiritual teachers, no matter what school or confession they belong to, use similar methods of teaching adults who are on the path of spiritual development — they teach how to sharpen and strengthen contact with the situation and prevent self-immersion.
This is also a deliberate equalization in importance of “important” and “unimportant” deeds, which should equally be done with full attention and maximum involvement, as the last deed of a person in this world before death, or as a deed pleasing to God, which He watches over.
This is also constant training on how to “be in a situation”, and not run away from it, not protest or desire a change to another, when a person fixes his installation for contact with the words spoken inside: “I agree. So be it. I accept it the way it is. I don’t want anything else.»
These methods of spiritual pedagogy are outwardly different, but they have the same goal: to establish a deeper and more productive relationship “I am the world”.
The ease of involuntary establishment of contact with the world is inherent in children by the very nature of their mental structure, we can say that it is «built into» their very being. Thanks to this, the child is able to solve the main problem of childhood — to fit into the world where he was born. As a person grows older, he loses his childish spontaneity in contacts with the outside world. He has his own and rather complex inner world, as well as the ability to consciously control his attention, which provides the opportunity to choose the place of his psychological stay: either inside himself or outside — in the outside world. A typical adult tends to “slip away” from the world where he is currently uncomfortable, to another. And only conscious purposeful work on himself allows him to rise to a qualitatively new level of regulation of mental life. Then, in relations with the world, a person is guided by the conscious principle of accepting the world as a given.
So, during independent walks, when the child is in a free mode of interaction with the environment, he is more active in contact with objects that interest him. The child learns and experiences them in all ways available to him.
An adult, again, is not inclined to actively penetrate into such a multitude of objects that he meets on the way, and he does not advise the child if he leads him somewhere: “Do not yawn around!” An adult usually has a goal towards which he is moving. In addition, he has been living in the world for too long and believes that everything around him is quite well known. An adult learns not so much the new as he knows the familiar. True, the worldview of an adult can change dramatically with a strong mental shock. Especially shocking is the news that he did not have long to live in the world. It instantly makes even insignificant trifles dear to him, to which he had not paid any attention before, but now he cannot see enough.
Due to the fact that the child is not burdened with ready-made models of cognitive behavior and the world is still new and interesting for him as an unknown land, the child is much freer than an adult in his search for events worthy of attention. And he conducts this search almost always.
Just as our body needs food to maintain biological life, so our psyche feeds on impressions coming from outside — the information that it needs to maintain a normal mental tone.
Due to the vastness of his life experience, an adult has a large amount of information preserved in memory, and thanks to this, in a situation of “event deficit”, his soul feeds on these reserves, like an organism feeds on accumulated fat.
The child, on the contrary, has few such reserves and needs a large volume of impressions coming from outside. His cognitive interest is fueled by any events and objects that at least somehow stand out against the general background — novelty or intensity of manifestation. And this is ensured by the constant work of involuntary attention, the task of which is to automatically respond to everything new, bright, loud, unusual. Involuntary attention is unstable, mobile, it constantly probes the space of the surrounding world, like a beam of a sentry searchlight, briefly lingering on some objects and easily switching to others. It is difficult for a child to concentrate on one thing for a long time, as an adult can do. But the flip side of the adult concentration of attention is that it is eliminated as unnecessary, everything that is not related to the subject of observation.
Involuntary attention is considered in the science of mental processes as a lower, primitive form of attention, common to humans and animals. Its biological basis is the orienting reflex, which I. P. Pavlov called: “the “what is it?” reflex.
Teachers do not respect involuntary attention because it seems to be controlled not by the person himself, his owner, but by external stimuli: something clinked, flashed, turned out to be brighter than everything else — and involuntary attention was already caught by this object, attached to him. Therefore, this type of attention is called involuntary — acting not according to the person’s own will, but in accordance with whimsical changes in events in the external environment. Teachers appreciate and try to develop in children voluntary attention, which is more complex in terms of regulation, which a person consciously controls in accordance with their cognitive tasks: directs attention to a certain object, focuses it, switches to another object, if necessary, etc. Indeed , for schooling this kind of attention is necessary. But for orientation in the world, it is also important for a person to have well-developed involuntary attention — the basis of his general observation, which works by itself whenever a person is awake.
Thanks to the work of involuntary attention, the psyche carries out continuous automatic monitoring of the situation in which the person is. Such attention is the basic mental mechanism that provides initial contact with the environment. The activity of involuntary attention is determined by the level of wakefulness of a person’s consciousness. In the Orthodox psychological tradition, it is called the word «sobriety». And the amount of involuntary attention characterizes the size of the information field from which the observer is able to read information.
A good distribution of involuntary attention in different directions from the human body creates a feeling of «fitting» into the three-dimensionality of the surrounding space. In general, actively working involuntary attention indicates a high level of wakefulness of a person, if we consider it from the point of view of the work of the psyche. If we evaluate involuntary attention as a manifestation of personality, then its activity expresses the mood for contact with the world and interest in life. Surprisingly, the meaning and value of well-functioning involuntary attention in children is usually unclear to parents and educators. It falls out of sight of educators who do not train it. It is possible and necessary to improve involuntary attention. The deepest and most subtle forms of his education are present in the spiritual meditative practices of the East. In our country, exercises for training involuntary attention can be found mainly in the arsenal of special pedagogy for adults — in the training of scouts, combatants, special forces — that is, when people are prepared for the fact that the entire environment should be considered as a potential adversary, whose actions must be continuously monitored.
And why shouldn’t the educator support the same setting for waking contact with the outside world, but not with a negative attitude towards confrontation, but with a positive attitude towards spiritual connection, towards love.
Due to this property, children are able not only to witty and unusual use of insignificant circumstances, but also manage to share spheres of influence with adults. Leaving behind them control over the big and the main, children often use the unobtrusive, peripheral, «junk» for their needs. So they build a whole game world right under the noses of adults, which often goes unnoticed by the elders.
When a child walks not alone, but with a friend, his creative activity increases markedly: what does not occur to one, the other will notice and do. Here, for example, one of the company playing in the yard has broken away from the others and is trying to ride on the gate leaf that separates the yard from the street. These large cast-iron lattice gates are well known to everyone. But the example of a friend suddenly tempts the children to come closer, to see and try the gate more closely. Together, they quickly discover a lot of wonderful features at the gate that children want to use right away. It turned out that you can ride on the gate built into the gate, you can climb to the very top of the gate, you can climb through their bars back and forth, and since the gate area is large, the entire children’s company can hang on them at the same time. From these general discoveries, the children quickly moved on to exploring what can be learned from the game with the gates for themselves: you can ride them with more or less speed and swing, showing off yourself, you can creak the gate, which other children did not guess, you can hang on the crossbar upside down and even with his eyes closed, causing admiration and envy of his friends with his courage. When all this was tried, the children found that the gate was only part of a larger situation. It turned out that if you climb on the gate, you can see everything from above and in a different way than from below. In addition, it immediately became interesting to check what impression the acquaintances and strangers passing below make that the child is sitting high, etc., etc.
If an object has many attractive properties, then it holds the child’s attention for a long time. Something can be lived for many days, weeks and even months, for example, a favorite tree with many thick branches and boughs that you can climb. And other items are quickly exhausted, and then the child moves and looks for new amusing situations.
Here are two friends of eleven years old who went for a walk in the winter. They’re walking past the garbage heap toward the playground near the school when they spot a discarded spring mattress covered in striped teak. The good news is that he wasn’t here yesterday. Immediately, friends begin to jump on it, like on a trampoline, testing the springs. On this, the main possibilities of the mattress seem to have already been exhausted, but this is not so. The mattress is large, on a wide wooden frame, its elastic surface is raised above the ground like a platform, and … the boys imagine that this is a ring, they box for a minute, and then they start pushing each other off the mattress with laughter — who will take over the space ?! When this succeeds, the mattress becomes a fortress. One defends her, standing on the mattress, and the other attacks, frantically throwing snowballs at the defender, who responds in kind. Finally, they have a fight in the snow, fall, wallow in the snow with pleasure, and then, having shaken themselves slightly, they cheerfully run on. This entire episode with the mattress took three or four minutes, and so much happened! (See fig. 12.3-12.6)
For a psychologist, there are several things that are interesting in this scene.
First, it is an incredibly high pace of events. It is expressed in a quick change in the plot moves of the game on the mattress — there were four of them. This pace is typical for normal healthy children and is not typical for adults: they are heavier, slower, because they are more concentrated — they have a different type of mental dynamics. Because of this difference in the speed at which adults and children experience situations, there are often conflicts between them: only the adult has delved into what is happening, and the child is already flying further.
Secondly, the example of this scene clearly shows how children, in a stream of continuous interactions, discover and use all the main properties of the mattress: its springiness, its area, which is limited and rises above the ground. At each phase of the children’s play, the properties of the mattress that are significant for them at the moment are symbolically generalized in a new game image: the mattress is a trampoline, the mattress is a ring, the mattress is a defensive platform. On the same real foundation in the form of this abandoned mattress, in three minutes the children built for themselves several consecutive and completely independent symbolic play spaces, visited there and lived them as a psychologically reliable reality.
Thus, at the same time, an object (mattress) exists for the child on two levels: as a specific real thing, the properties of which he actively explores in living interaction with it, and equally as a fantasy object, the semantic content of which the child constructs in different ways. depending on what properties of the mattress as things are important for him at the moment. The child makes a symbolic transition from one plane of existence to another, relying on the significant features of a real object identified by him. These signs serve for him as a transitional bridge from the prosaic material reality to the symbolic world, also real, but woven from a different material. This is the world of mental reality, consisting of the material of children’s sensations, impressions, thoughts, assessments, generalized in fantasy images. The child always builds a bridge between these two worlds, and, like every normal bridge, this bridge has two real supports. With its two ends it is grounded, rests against the dense substance of the real world. One end of it relies on the game object and the variety of its properties. And the support of its other end is the living body of the child himself.
The moving and feeling body of the child comes into direct contact with the object of the game. It is it that lives through all the vicissitudes of this interaction. It is a carrier of feelings, thoughts, experiences, fantasies and at the same time — a tool with which the human soul embodies itself in real actions and deeds.
The human body is mental. Therefore, the memory of emotionally significant events is stored not only in our spiritual memories, but even in the very flesh of the body: it is encoded there in the “language” of small muscle tensions.
In order for the child to feel his “I” fully included and emotionally living the game situation, his bodily “I” must be physically involved in the game process, be inside the game action as a physical participant in the events. Such completeness of bodily involvement in a living situation with “real” obstacles, shelters, ditches, trees, puddles, grass, sand, snow, etc., is achieved only in outdoor games and is not fully compensated by home games with toys. From a psychological point of view, this “realness” of the play environment during a walk and the fullness of the child’s involvement in it is even more valuable than the fresh air that parents usually bake about.
In adults, observation, contemplation of something is often completely divorced from action, does not imply an act in relation to this object or situation, but ends simply with a statement of fact: this is so — period. There should be no continuation.
An adult is usually aware of himself as something separate, distinguishes himself from the environment: here is the “I” — there they are. Therefore, an adult person tends to be in one of two opposite states. Or his attention is strongly shifted to himself, or, conversely, to the outside world. In children, to a greater extent, there is a simultaneous experience of themselves and the world in interaction with each other. In the behavior of the child, this is manifested in his desire to actively enter into personal and active relationships with all objects that attract attention. This is especially noticeable during free walks.
Here is the column dug in. Interesting. What is he? I’ll try, can I download it? Can I see if I can get on it?
Relationships end when interest ends. Interest disappears when the properties of the object with which you can interact are exhausted: the column does not swing, you can’t climb on it, there’s nothing more to do here, I’ll move on!
Or when, upon contact with the object, the child’s own resources run out — there is not enough desire, skills, strength or time.
The child and the object that attracted him are connected by many invisible threads of interest. It is born in the depths of the child’s soul and inspires him to search for new and new properties of the object, forcing him to examine, feel, push, etc.
This deep personal interest is nourished by the fact that during active interaction with the object, the child always learns and experiences his own properties and possibilities.
Here is a twelve-year-old boy walking past a two-story house in winter, with numerous icicles hanging from the roof. He cannot pass by such a temptation, bends down and diligently sculpts a dense snowball from wet snow. At this moment, a friend joins the boy, and they begin to passionately sculpt and throw snowballs, enthusiastically meeting the fall of icicles after a well-aimed hit and competing with each other (see Fig. 12-7).
Observing their behavior, one can at least partially reconstruct the internal dialogue of the first boy.
— Here are the icicles hanging. Much like! (Attention on the subject)
«I wonder if I can beat them?» (Attention on the attitude of «I» is the subject.)
— Oh, how they fell down! (Attention on the subject)
How nice to swing and throw! How great I am! I throw harder and more accurately than a friend. (Attention on yourself, then on the relationship «I» — comrade).
Children intuitively feel that, actively learning the world through actions, you learn about yourself. The converse statement: knowing yourself, you will know the world, is also true. But people usually begin to understand it much later, in adulthood.
The more diverse the subject-spatial and social (in the form of a children’s community) environment surrounding the child, the more interesting he can find for himself outside. But this external environment can also be poor. For example, every day children go out for a walk in the same meager yard — and yet they are constantly busy with something, and something happens there for them.
In each situation, the child usually finds a balance between what the environment gives him and what he puts into it himself. When the environment is poor, the child tries to «finish» it to an acceptable level of attractiveness for him. We have already encountered manifestations of this childish quality in previous chapters.
Based on observations of children, it is possible to identify the ways in which the child independently enriches his environment in order to satisfy his own play and personal needs. Basically, the child uses the psychological arsenal, since he does not have real opportunities to truly rebuild the world around him or leave an unpleasant situation in search of more attractive places due to his young age and social lack of independence. (Unless he decides to run away from home)
With most of the children’s methods of expanding and enriching the space inhabited by the child, we have already met in the examples given above. However, now it will be useful to formulate them in general terms.
The first way is to expand the information field in which the child searches for new events within the framework of a familiar situation. This is ensured by the ability to notice new properties in familiar objects and build on this new forms of interaction with them. (As an example, we can recall the episode with the gate). This is helped by involuntary attention to everything that catches the eye — important and unimportant, as well as orientation to the «weak» signs of objects and the absence of stereotypical attitudes of perception.
Another way is due to the child’s ability to change the scale of vision. Due to this, the space in the child’s perception can «pulsate», either expanding or narrowing, as if the child periodically puts a telescope to the eyes. and directs it to objects of interest to him. Thus, in the «big» world, you can see many «small» worlds and grow them to the size of the «big».
For example, a child can see a small puddle with mud and rubbish at the bottom as a sea with sunken ships. Or he will perceive a crack in the ground, through which ants move, as a canyon, where it is necessary to build a bridge of straw for hurrying travelers.
The next, universal and most powerful way of enriching the environment, which is included in almost all other options, is that the real objective situation is comprehended symbolically and a new, fantasy space of events is created on its basis: a mattress is a ring, a puddle is a sea, a crack is canyon. In this way, you can transform any situation into something interesting.
It is also possible to “build up” an object, situation or character of the surrounding world to the desired condition so that it can become a “hero of a children’s novel”. For this, new, fantastic properties are attributed to the “hero”, a legend about him is invented, etc. All this makes the object so attractive, interesting or scary that you want to play with it. (See example when children gave a gardening woman a scary biography of child abductor.)
Another way is to shift the search for novelty from the object to itself: the child seeks to set himself various and increasingly complex tasks in interaction with a well-known object that is constant. We will explore this approach in more detail in the next chapter, where we will talk about skiing from the icy mountains.
There are also physical means of changing the world around in the children’s arsenal. These are various forms of children’s construction of snow fortresses, sandy garages and castles, dams, canals, shelters and «headquarters», and even entire «worlds», where sometimes children play for years. This includes the tradition of making «secrets» and «hiding places», graffiti — drawings and inscriptions on asphalt and walls, drawing asphalt for playing hopscotch — all these are ways to create their own children’s spaces inside the big world of adults.
If we list all children’s strategies for expanding and enriching the space of being available to them, then, of course, they should include the previously discussed group children’s «events» hidden from adults, such as visiting «terrible places» (as well as other types of places), garbage dumps and dumps , research trips on public transport, secret hikes and parent-sanctioned cycling, etc.
In general, it turns out an impressive list of possibilities. The child realizes them as fully as possible together with other children during free independent walks, which, as we see, are of great psychological importance for him.