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Playing By the Rules
Among my sharpest memories of my grammar school education in Virginia, and there are many, was of the endless attention paid to teaching us how to Follow Directions. There were weekly exercises in blindly following ridiculous lists of instructions, which encouraged vague competition and extreme smugness about a- what would you call it? a talent? a propensity?- that wouldn't rate a flicker of interest in anyone.
So in the way that becoming a parent makes everything old new again, I often find that when I am most likely to grit my teeth as a new parent, I am reminded of fourth grade.
Toy guidelines (now that I've confessed my general enchantment with playthings) have become the latest in the string of caregiver rules that bring up and urge to rebel. I want to follow them, and yet they make no sense.
For example:
Felix was given a pile of super classic alphabet blocks, familiar to everyone. Non-threatening, low-tech, impossible to choke on. He enjoys knocking down little towers of letters and hasn't yet figured out that they can be flung all over the place.
But according to the guidelines, Felix shouldn't have these blocks at all. The set he has is labeled as being for ages 2 and up. Then again this completely similar set is supposedly inappropriate for kids under 36 months. And yet, if the blocks have numbers on them, they're apparently safe for an 18-month-old, and if the letters are Greek, they are safe to give to baby who has attained a mere 12 months of age.
A quick consultation with various analyses of toy guidelines provides no help at all. The reasoning behind the age delineations is two-pronged. On the one hand, there is safety and the fear that babies could choke on small parts or strings, or get little fingers caught in toy parts, that sort of thing; on the other there is the anxiety that giving a child a toy too early could make him or her frustrated with the inability to play with it properly. (Here I wonder a little bit if this "frustration" is something that the parent transfers to the kid. I don't know many babies who care too much about playing with something the "right" way, and boring toys quickly get abandoned anyway.)
Well, these are blocks, and I don't think I'm pushing my kid too hard by giving them to him, nor do I think he could get more than the corner of one into his mouth. And so I'm back in Charlottesville, angry at the rules, sorry that I feel mildly anxious about ignoring them and peevish when I follow them. I’m no goody two-shoes, but the arbitrariness of everything, especially safety, is truly annoying.
I'm expecting it just goes on this way.
(Grownups who can't part with this bit of nostalgia, by the way, can always get the alphabet block salt and pepper shakers).
posted by Elise at 10:30 AM
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