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Post by Einhorn on Mar 24, 2023 18:08:20 GMT
What are kittens doing when they play-fight and 'hunt' their siblings? It is believed that they are learning the skills necessary to hunt and kill in adulthood. Play is a learning tool. It is thought that play is a learning tool for all species who engage in it.
Roleplay is, perhaps, the most common form of play engaged in by human children (roleplaying cops and robbers, etc.). Why is that? What skill is the child learning for adulthood when he engages in roleplay?
Carl Jung had a theory. He believed that we are all unique individuals, with our own unique ideas. However, society can't accommodate all these different ideas. In order for society to work, we must conform to a standard, we must all read from the same page. A degree of uniqueness is fine, but limits must be placed upon it. Where our beliefs go beyond what is acceptable, we must wear a mask to hide those beliefs. We may believe something, but we must not say it if it is too far outside the box of what is acceptable; instead, we must play the role of someone who believes what everyone else appears to believe, or risk condemnation from the group.
Roleplay is the human child's preparation for a life of pretending to be something he is not, pretending to believe things he does not, in the same way that play-fighting is a kitten's way of preparing for a lifetime of acquiring food for itself.
Do you agree or disagree?
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Post by Bentley on Mar 24, 2023 19:58:31 GMT
Someone I know told me that they were telling their therapist about how their mother involved them in family politics when they were small children .( pre school).
Their mother told them about problems with their father dating back decades .
They told the therapist that they were uncomfortable with it at the time and knew it was wrong .
The therapist replied that this was a false memory. The fact is that children accept any environment that they are in and the uncomfortable feelings and judgement were created a long time afterwards .
Society is a human construct. Of course we must conform to a standard ( just as there is an any animal society)but I don’t think that children consciously or unconsciously know this .
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Post by Dan Dare on Mar 25, 2023 9:26:02 GMT
More to the point, why do boys reach for guns while girls prefer dolls? Both unprompted.
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Post by Orac on Mar 25, 2023 9:43:27 GMT
Yoda mode:
A tree is a tree, but the exact way a tree grows in a forest depends, to a large degree, on the other trees.
A child looks for a fit model to emulate until they have enough confidence to add to it. A child's parents (having reproduced) are a fit model. I'd guess role playing is natural and universal and helps a child navigate the distinction between inner and outer which is necessary for society.
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Post by Cartertonian on Mar 25, 2023 9:49:28 GMT
Before I went into teaching mental health nursing for a living, I had been a therapist - specifically a trauma psychotherapist.
Inevitably, that colours my view of the world.
I'll come back to role play in a minute, but what's interesting to me is that so many threads and opinions on here are complaining about people who 'deviate from the norm'. Indeed, in older times that was where the term 'deviant' came from and was often applied to those with mental health problems.
The question (for me at least, as an academic) is, 'who sets the norm?'
As Darling's quote above intimates, if we prepare our children (or they intuitively self-prepare) for a life of pretending to believe things we do not, we are all roleplaying, all the time. In my view therefore, many mental health problems derive from playing roles that do not sit comfortably with who we believe we are.
Let me give you an example. I spent almost all of my thirty year clinical career in the Armed Forces. In 2002, I was a captain in the Army and the OC of our military mental health unit in Germany. One day, I was shopping in the American PX (Post Exchange - a shop) and queuing at the till behind a bloke who was taller than me, much more muscular than me and better looking than me. I noticed I was feeling intimidated by his sheer presence. Then he turned toward me to move something on the conveyor belt that had got stuck and bumped into me. He recoiled rapidly, with a shocked look on his face and said, "Oh! Sorry, sir." He was a sergeant. I couldn't see his rank because in our uniform we wear our rank slides on front-mounted epaulettes and he obviously hadn't seen mine because I was behind him, but as soon as he realised I was an officer he was immediately cowed - intimidated by me as I had been of him.
So, like society, the military is yet another human construct and if we all play our roles, it works. But in this case I was deeply unsettled and reflected then and for many years on why it was that I had felt intimidated in the first place. Clearly, at the time I had no sense of being who the Army said I was. I have reflected on that over the many intervening years and it has only really been since I left the Army last year that I feel as if I have 'grown into my skin'. When I 'play the role' of Dr Cartertonian, academic and veteran, I no longer feel any inner conflict. It's just a shame I had to wait until I was 55 to finally match my self to my role.
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Post by Orac on Mar 25, 2023 10:12:10 GMT
The question (for me at least, as an academic) is, 'who sets the norm?' Let me offer my take. The question itself is maybe a bit over-personalised. The question invites us to imagine some special class of high-handed, busy body 'norm setters', writing down commandments and discipline regimes. While there are cases of this appearing to happen, most of the actual heavy lifting that goes into turning a regime into a norm is done by nature itself. Norms are emergent from societies that succeed rather than fail. In the same way that our bodies are handed down to us from past organisms that reproduced, our norms are handed down to us from past societies that succeeded and spread. |
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Post by Bentley on Mar 25, 2023 10:25:55 GMT
If every man born has a predisposition to be a bricklayer then society would have to persuade or coerce most men to find a job that they were not happy to do .
The man who always wanted to lay bricks would HAVE to reinvented himself as a doctor , airline pilot, soldier, car mechanic etc.
Society needs the vast majority to do what they are told .
I met an old school Chinese medicine “ doctor” a couple of decades ago. He come from mainland China . He told me that most ordinary Chinese people were allocated jobs . They didn't choose. So consequently they did as little work as possible .
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Post by Einhorn on Mar 25, 2023 15:13:32 GMT
The question (for me at least, as an academic) is, 'who sets the norm?' Norms are emergent from societies that succeed rather than fail. In the same way that our bodies are handed down to us from past organisms that reproduced, our norms are handed down to us from past societies that succeeded and spread. There is obviously a lot more to norms than that. Jews drink alcohol. Muslims don't. Jews and Muslims lived in the same conditions for years, yet had opposing norms. There is a theory that Muslims adopted their prohibition on alcohol only because Jews drank alcohol. It was a means of separating themselves as a group. The theory goes that muslims would have included alcohol as a central part of their religion if Jews had been abstinent. The same goes for table manners. There was a time when the aristocracy would spit on the banquet room floor, belch loudly, etc., while eating. This changed when the King took their armies from them. The possession of an army was what had distinguished the aristocracy from the hoi polloi before. Deprived of this distinguisher, the aristocracy then set about distinguishing themselves with table manners, etc. (I think this is Durkheim's theory). As always, the ordinary people followed suit in time. These are just theories, of course. But, if true, the desire of groups to set themselves apart as a distinct group is at least as powerful a force for establishing norms as any contribution norms may make to survival. So, one answer to the question who sets norms is: the group you don't wish to be associated with. They set norms in the sense that you must do the opposite of what they do if you wish to be a distinct entity. |
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Post by Ripley on Mar 25, 2023 15:37:33 GMT
Children play other games besides cops and robbers. Role play affords opportunities to share, to negotiate, to bond, to try out behaviors, see their impact and test limits.
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Post by Einhorn on Mar 25, 2023 15:45:00 GMT
Children play other games besides cops and robbers. Role play affords opportunities to share, to negotiate, to bond, to try out behaviors, see their impact and test limits. No doubt. But I imagine that roleplay caught Jung's attention because it is such a big part of children's play. There are ways to bond and try out behaviours that don't involve pretending to be someone else, yet these don't seem to be as popular. I'm not saying Jung is correct, only that it's an interesting idea. |
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Post by Ripley on Mar 25, 2023 16:01:11 GMT
Children play other games besides cops and robbers. Role play affords opportunities to share, to negotiate, to bond, to try out behaviors, see their impact and test limits. No doubt. But I imagine that roleplay caught Jung's attention because it is such a big part of children's play. There are ways to bond and try out behaviours that don't involve pretending to be someone else, yet these don't seem to be as popular. I'm not saying Jung is correct, only that it's an interesting idea. It is an interesting idea but whose conclusion is it to say: "Roleplay is the human child's preparation for a life of pretending to be something he is not, pretending to believe things he does not..." Yours, or Jung's? One of the young children in my family is extremely creative and imaginitive and loves to role play. Her mother is a clinical psychologist who, I'm sure, would divert her toward other pursuits if she believed that role play was preparing her child for a life of inauthenticity. If anything, I think she thinks it is a healthy way for young children to safely explore possibilities and feelings. |
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Post by Einhorn on Mar 25, 2023 16:02:24 GMT
No doubt. But I imagine that roleplay caught Jung's attention because it is such a big part of children's play. There are ways to bond and try out behaviours that don't involve pretending to be someone else, yet these don't seem to be as popular. I'm not saying Jung is correct, only that it's an interesting idea. It is an interesting idea but whose conclusion is it to say: "Roleplay is the human child's preparation for a life of pretending to be something he is not, pretending to believe things he does not..." Yours, or Jung's? Jung's. I'm in no position to confirm or deny his conclusions. I'm interested to hear any thoughts that might support or undermine his claim. |
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Post by Einhorn on Mar 25, 2023 16:06:09 GMT
No doubt. But I imagine that roleplay caught Jung's attention because it is such a big part of children's play. There are ways to bond and try out behaviours that don't involve pretending to be someone else, yet these don't seem to be as popular. I'm not saying Jung is correct, only that it's an interesting idea. One of the young children in my family is extremely creative and imaginitive and loves to role play. Her mother is a clinical psychologist who, I'm sure, would divert her toward other pursuits if she believed that role play was preparing her child for a life of inauthenticity. Why would her mother do that? Jung believed that a degree of inauthenticity is required for people to succeed in society. Her mother would be denying her an essential social tool (assuming Jung is correct). |
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Post by Ripley on Mar 25, 2023 16:15:34 GMT
It is an interesting idea but whose conclusion is it to say: "Roleplay is the human child's preparation for a life of pretending to be something he is not, pretending to believe things he does not..." Yours, or Jung's? Jung's. I'm in no position to confirm or deny his conclusions. I'm interested to hear any thoughts that might support or undermine his claim. It sounds harsh, but I can see how role play can be a vehicle for testing different behaviors and a barometer of sorts, an indicator of which behaviors are fruitful and/or acceptable to the group and which are not. I've just been reading a most interesting book on linguistics/anthropology (Don't Sleep, there are Snakes, by Daniel Everett) in which the author describes how members of the Pirahã tribe view children as small adults. They allow their toddlers to play with knives and don't protect them when they're endangering themselves. Consequently the children are full of wounds. They have to learn the hard way, fast. |
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Post by Orac on Mar 25, 2023 16:36:54 GMT
Norms are emergent from societies that succeed rather than fail. In the same way that our bodies are handed down to us from past organisms that reproduced, our norms are handed down to us from past societies that succeeded and spread. There is obviously a lot more to norms than that. Jews drink alcohol. Muslims don't. Jews and Muslims lived in the same conditions for years, yet had opposing norms. I think you have misunderstood me a bit. If we go back to the analogy re biological organisms and inheritance - two organisms can have different features and share an environment. They will each have successful bundles of features that are passed down because they are successful packages. We inherit our norms from (probably) several of these successful social organisms |
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