Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Playing house.


It seems that it must be a natural instinct for girls to want to play house.  Not that I would have any knowledge of what little girls like to play, since there are only 4 of them running around my house!  We had never told the girls or taught the girls about the game called playing house, but they seem to just know how to do that.  Not only do they know how to play house naturally, they can play house in just about any given situation with just about any sort of object to use as people.  A perfect example of this happened today while we were getting ready to make dinner.  Brooke and I were sitting at the kitchen counter and Sarah, our 3 year old, aka Fed, or the tornado, climbed up beside Brooke at the counter.  She then immediately grabbed the two screwdrivers that happened to be sitting on the counter, handed one to Brooke and said, "Mommy, lets play house."  She then proceeded to hold the screwdriver in an upright position and bounce it along the counter like it was walking and made it have a conversation with the screwdriver that Brooke was holding.  The screwdriver family had a nice time conversing and dancing around our counter for a few minutes and then the tornado moved on to bigger and better things.
So this phenomenon seems to be built into little girls and comes naturally to them.  At this point 75% of the little girls I have been able study have this behavior built in.  That 25% that has not displayed this knowledge, does not speak in full adult English sentences yet, but I bet once she does, we will discover that the babbling sounds she makes now is her version of playing house, we just don't speak that language to be able to tell.  I am not sure if my sample size is big enough to be statistically significant, but I am going to draw my own conclusions anyway.  Let me know if you see any little girls that need to be taught to play house!  I have 4 that are professionals and would love to teach anyone that does not know how.  They do not even need to bring their own screwdriver.  They will just use whatever happens to be handy when it is time to play!

1 comment:

Sheri said...

Just like little boys take anything and make car sounds with it!
Good observation, John!