I love a good movie—one that moves me in some way—to tears, joy, or both! Usually I am “into” the Academy Awards. But COVID and, now the war in Ukraine, put a damper on these types of frivolities for me. I used to love seeing the fabulous gowns and hair styles of the woman stars, especially, all decked out looking their best, which is much better than I can ever hope to look. I absorbed their stellar perfection without envy, well, maybe a little wistful longing creeped in now and then. But overall, I accepted my place in the universe: Definitely a long way from that red carpet. Yes, that’s me: an accepting spectator to the luscious lives of familiar strangers.
While stark current realities sobered me up from the heady glamor of the Academy Awards, I still admire the deep drive and collective creativity necessary to produce interesting, beautiful, thoughtful films. And, gosh the skill and discipline of actors to inhabit the bodies and minds of those they portray so flawlessly—I am ever in awe of that talent—that amazing ability to imagine being another person so thoroughly that you can fool others into believing you are just that person.
And this leads me to what I do have a hard time accepting. In fact, I find it such a major irony of our times and that is:
Grown men and women are paid outrageous sums for spending time in pretend play, while too many children spend their days with screens and do not know the inherent gifts of spending time in pretend play!
Those chosen adults, we call “stars” live like royalty because they spend doing what they love: Pretend Play! And yes, acting is hard work—I wouldn’t deny that (I had the lead in my high school play, after all.)…but think about this for a moment: How backwards this all is…adults are put on pedestals for imagining they are someone else. Yet our little ones are spending little or no time in imaginative, pretend play that would actively support their optimal development.
Are you as perplexed as I am about this state of affairs?
I wrote a poem about this over a decade ago (I’ve been churning on this for quite some time) and it goes like this:
We Watch Grown Ups Play Dress-Up
We watch grown-ups play dress-up and call them stars,
While we worship their psychosis and along the way,
Young imaginations starve.
Forsaking make-believe, hollow-eyed little people mimic
adults in offices, fixed to screen-machines.
The resplendent passes them by.
No notice. No time for costumes, plot, or dialogue—no
possibility hunting.
After all, you can’t conjure what could be without a will to
innovate or a burning desire to create. That ember left long ago.
We got it all wrong.
Paying millions to adults for romps in the imaginal world while
the little people here in this world enter someone’s else world,
not knowing how to escape.
(From: Left to Their Devices, What’s Left?, Gloria DeGaetano, West Bow Press, 2011)
Imitative vs. Generative Play
And here’s another rub: too often when our children are in pretend play, they mimic the “stars” instead of making up their own ideas, characters, and situations. A way to think about the distinctions are:
Imitative Pretend Play Generative Pretend Play____________________________
Replicates TV/movie/video game scripts Invents own dialogue, makes up new words, own language
Only commercial toys Empty boxes, kitchen utensils, junk mail, etc.,
Toys stay the same Toys take on magical properties and become various things
Uses memory to reproduce what is seen Uses images from screens and from books, life experiences
Developing a generative imagination in early childhood is critically important. Research conducted by Dr. Jerome and Dr. Dorothy Singer at Yale University for two decades showed the value of pretend play for growing children’s imagination. They also found significant other benefits as well: “Children who engage in pretend play smile and laugh more, have longer attention spans and more satisfying peer relationships, and are less aggressive than children who do not know the joy of make-believe play.” (Singer and Singer, The House of Make-Believe, 1990)
Their research also showed that youngsters’ creativity and problem-solving abilities decrease as their screen time increases. “Our data and observations indicated that heavy TV viewing did not seem to be conducive to the development of imaginative capacities. The heavy viewers seemed less likely to be our most imaginative children.” (Singer and Singer, TV, Imagination, and Aggression: A Study of Preschoolers, 1981)
With screen technologies every image is given. Absolutely zero images are generated by the child—so different from every image conjured up while reading. And, even if youngsters are browsing a picture book, there may be up to 40-50illustrations. Yet, those pictures are only a part of the story; all the other story parts are constructed in the child’s head. Contrastthat with at least 2,000 images in a two-hour movie, or thousands of images in a week of video game playing, and we cansee that the cumulative result of a steady screen diet is an under-exercised mental imagery.
Yet, image-making is critically important as it provides access to the symbolic functions of our brain, allowing us to imagine new possibilities—the first step in creating innovations. Studies reveal that when faced with extreme physical deprivation, imaginative people were able to discover new pathways out of their situations better than unimaginative people. (Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt Brace and Company, 318. 1999.)
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the imagination as giving a person “a portable set of rules” in which to mitigate reality. “Whenever the outside world offers no mercy,” he writes, “an internal symbolic system can become a salvation. Anyone in possession of portable rules for the mind has a great advantage.” (Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper and Row, 128. 1990.)
Interestingly enough, time spent with interactive media does not enhance mental imagery capacities. A 2020 study of 266 children, ages 3-11, demonstrated that those using more screen media showed statistically significantly lower performances on mental imagery: “Mental imagery performance was lower in children exposed to more screen-time because they have less experience with the active creation of their own mental images.” This held true for both passive media such as TV viewing and active media such as playing video or app games. The authors stated, “even…so-called active media types might still not involve much active imagery generation, especially in comparison to other typical childhood experiences (e.g., reading, imaginative play).” (Suggate, S.P., Martzog P., “Screen-time influences children’s mental imagery performance,” Developmental Science, e12978. 2020.)
These patterns of research need our serious attention because there is so much at stake—for children, for families, indeed, for our society as a whole. Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his book, Evolution’s End, explains this well:
“Failing to develop imagery means…children who can’t ‘see’ what the mathematical symbol or the semantic words mean, nor the chemical formulae, nor the concept of civilization as we know it. They can’t comprehend the subtleties of our Constitution or Bill of Rights and are seriously…bored by abstractions of this sort. They can sense only what is immediately bombarding their physical system and are restless and ill-at-ease without such bombardment. Being sensory deprived they initiate stimulus through constant movement…Having no inner imaging capacity leaves most of the brain unemployed, and a child who can’t imagine not only can’t learn but has no hope in general. He or she can’t ‘imagine’ an inner scenario to replace the outer one, so feels victimized by the environment…unimaginative children are far more prone to violence than imaginative children, because they can’t imagine an alternative when direct sensory information is threatening, insulting, unpleasant, or unrewarding. They lash out against unpleasantness in typical R-system [reptilian system] defensiveness, while the imaginative child can imagine an alternative, that is, create images…that offer a way out…imagination gives resiliency, flexibility, endurance, and the capacity to forgo immediate reward on behalf of long-term strategies.” (pp. 167-168)
Copyright, Gloria DeGaetano, 2022.
For more information on this, and other issues, related to too much screen time, check out my new e-book: Patterns Over Time: A Research Summary: Screen Time and Healthy Development.