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My analytic office is located on the second floor of a building with a Montessori preschool below, where the day is punctuated by the children’s outdoor playtime. Usually, I find the sound of the children’s play to be soothing and comforting. But sometimes I find myself listening in on the children and, over the years, noticing the subtle ways in which the quality of their playing has changed.
Recently, a small group of 3 ½-year-old boys were engaged in a discussion about what kind of pizza to order. As one of them held a rock up to his ear and fashioned a make-believe cell phone, the disagreement escalated, with one child insisting that his pizza needed to be both vegan and gluten-free. A second boy squatted on the ground and insisted that he was trying to be flexible, but vehemently protested that “a vegan pizza was not a pizza”. As the argument became quite heated, the third boy’s eyes darted back and forth, from one of his two playmates to the other, with the expression of someone tasked with solving this dilemma. Suddenly, he grabbed the “rock telephone” and threw it far away from his playmates.
Unfortunately, it happened to be a moment when there were no preschool teachers nearby. It would have been intriguing to observe what approach the teacher would have used to intervene if they would even choose to intervene at all. And soon I found myself flooded with a cascade of questions: What would the teachers notice? Would they see this interaction as a moment of engaged play, or by contrast, a moment of failed play? What would they think was being enacted? Were the teachers familiar with the parents and families of these three children? And most importantly, how would I, as a child clinician, think about intervening with these children, or talking with the preschool teachers, about what was being communicated?
Shortly after this experience, I was excited to receive the compendium The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Psychoanalytic, Attachment and Deve