graynation: thinking outside the box inside the box

It is true that people my age, when we were children, would get a gift that came in a box, play with the gift for a minute or two, then take the box outside and play with it.

Our parents would act befuddled. They couldn't explain it. And they didn't have anyone to explain it to them. Professionals in the 1940s, like Dr. Spock, were beginning to research child behavior. But parents, even if they cared to look, couldn't find much information about why a kid could get a great gift, then prefer the box it came in. A few parents would intrude, calling the child out for ignoring the gift, particularly if it was a gift from a favorite relative. But most parents, in the 1940s and '50s when I was a kid, would just let the child play with the box.

I don't remember, hunkered in my box in the front yard, peering over the rim for enemy airplanes or lions or spacemen, any adult coming out to ask me why I preferred the box. If they had, and I could have articulated it at the time, I might have said, "The box is full of questions, and the questions are very interesting." Actually, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said something like, "It's fun."

As it turns out, researchers can now tell us, I was learning. And learning was fun. Who would have thought? But it's true, and I think most people have known it, without knowing it, all along. Once we realize it, we see how obvious it is. In my journalism classes, we write a story about a 13-month-old named Duane Shelby who has been ordered to report for job placement or lose his food stamp privilege. At its core, the story is about a bureaucratic screw-up, but we're always looking for ways to make the story interesting. So we ask ourselves: what do we know about Duane Shelby? For example, can Duane work? You wouldn't think so, until you think about watching a 13-month-old at play. When he isn't sleeping, Duane Shelby works all day long. Every move he makes is a learning experience.

All us Duane Shelbys are explorers. We learn the most, and have the most fun, with things unknown. Traditionally, by the time a kid was four years old, the unknown was always outside, sometimes with a box full of questions. As time went by, we staked out neighborhoods. I call them our "sovereign neighborhoods," our home turf, or what today is frequently called a 'hood. To better understand your childhood sovereign neighborhood, read some of the anecdotes at my blog of that name.

Kids in my generation went outside naturally – wasn't much to do inside – but in the '60s and '70s, that started to change, as television, and then computers, and then the digital blizzard, lured kids indoors. Today's parents and grandparents are made uncomfortable by that, sometimes just by instinct, an instinct that we easily acted upon by going outside, and that we wish for today's kids as well, because there is something important out there. Various researchers have started to put their finger on it, including my San Diego friend in journalism Richard Louv, who identified it as "nature-deficit disorder," wrote a prize-winning book about it, and created a national "Children & Nature Network."

Now, in the Aug. 16 New York Times, comes a report about a Berkeley researcher, Alison Gopnik, who worries that parents think their babies, their very own Duane Shelbys, should "learn in a focused planned way," even though research shows those babies can learn better when left to their own devices. They "carefully watch," she writes, "ceaselessly manipulate," and "imagine different ways that the world might be." This, she says, is "very different from schoolwork," which is mostly data compilation.

"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally," Gopnik concludes, "and, most of all, by just allowing them to play."

And that, the brave sons and daughters who are the parents of our young learning-machine grandchildren, is the advice from one box-loving graynation veteran of the pre-digital world.