Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
First of all, what do you think are some of the common misconceptions regarding children and their minds?
Well, for many years people thought that children were basically defective adults – that they were like grown-ups, but missing certain important things that grown-ups could do. Even the great Jean Piaget, the founder of development psychology and cognitive development, thought that children were egocentric and amoral and that they had a very limited ability to understand or perceive abstract ideas such as causality etc. In fact, what we have discovered is that, far from being egocentric and limited in their thinking, even the very youngest children know more and understand more than we ever could have thought. They can think logically, understand cause and effect and take the perspective of other people.
So there have been some big changes in our understanding of children, which we will explore with your five book choices. First up is Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, by Marjorie Taylor.
This is a book by one of the people who has been part of the new wave of research in cognitive development. What Marjorie did is to deal with a really fascinating phenomenon that all parents notice, which is the fact that children often have these imaginary friends who are very vivid and significant. Traditionally, explanations for this were either psychoanalytic explanations that had something to do with children’s neurosis, or the Piagetian idea that children failed to understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
What Marjorie did, and what makes the book so fascinating, is that she interviewed children in a very systematic and scientific way about their imaginary companions. Part of what is lovely about the book is the descriptions of these wonderful, strange creatures that the children invent.
She discovered that children can distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Exactly. She discovered that children can distinguish perfectly well, that they know that even very beloved and vivid imaginary companions are imaginary. And she discovered that the children who had imaginary companions weren’t any crazier or smarter or lonelier than those who didn’t. In fact, something like more than 60% of all the children interviewed reported some kind of imaginary companion or friend. What Marjorie also showed is that children were actually using these imaginary friends to try to understand the real people around them. So children with imaginary friends did better at understanding other people, in what has come to be called Theory of Mind, than children without. What had looked like a deficit suffered by certain children was actually a help to them, and an example of how brilliant children are at working and thinking to try and figure out the world around them and, in this case, to figure out the people around them.
And this is something you have actually seen with your own niece?
That’s right. It is a wonderful specific example. My niece, who grew up in high-powered literary New York, had an imaginary friend who was too busy to play with her. This is actually quite typical of the descriptions and stories you will find in Marjorie’s book. And what is nice is that Marjorie is not only describing these things, but explaining them.
Your next book, The People in the Playground, looks at Iona Opie’s fieldwork in a British playground at the end of the 1970s.
Yes. Iona and her husband Peter were folklorists, and they went out to try to understand children, in the same way that an anthropologist would go into a distant tribe or a folklorist would record the songs and stories of people in some distant place. Their great book, The Lore and Language of School Children, is a wonderful record of what schoolchildren do – the rhymes and songs, rituals and mythology of the school yard. What they discovered was that children have an incredibly powerful and wide-ranging social network – so that a rhyme would show up in a school somewhere in northern England, and within a year you could hear the same rhyme on the west coast of America.
Which is pretty incredible, given that this was a time before Facebook and social networking – and the children are so young.
Yes, it is amazing that long before computerised ‘social networking’ they would have their own social network. They managed it through travel – for example, one child might move down to London and introduce something to a new school, and then someone from that school might move to America, and the chain would continue until it reached the west coast. What I particularly love about the Opies’ book is that they did this beautiful scholarship, and their key message was that, instead of thinking of children as defective grown-ups, we should see schoolchildren as people who are also creating their own world and trying to understand the world around them. Also, they are often creating a world that is richer than the one we can imagine as adults.
This particular book is especially appealing because it is so personal and immediate. It is a kind of diary that Iona kept after her husband Peter died, a record of a year in the playground, just sitting in the corner and watching what the children were doing. She would go to a playground like an anthropologist would go to a village, sit in a corner, and get accepted by the children and find out all the things they were doing and talking about.
Let’s move on to your next book, Janet Astington’s The Child's Discovery of the Mind.
This book is part of Harvard University Press’s excellent series, The Developing Child.
Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkley. She is an internationally recognised leader in the study of children’s learning and development, and was the first to argue that children’s minds can help us understand deep philosophical questions. She has written numerous articles and several books on the subject.
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