Games children play

Jim had a post a few days ago about the games children play. He mentioned playing hide and seek with Henry, and it made me think of us playing that game recently as well. A couple of weekends ago when Elaine came for dinner, she brougth one of Devon's friends from daycare, Liam, and at one point during the evening Elaine proposed playing hide and seek. It was really interesting to see how the game evolved. At first Liam counted while Elaine and Devon "hid," and I put this in quotation marks because Devon really had no idea what to do and finally Elaine took her hand and they hid together. Then Elaine counted, so Liam went and hid (Liam is 4, so he has a better idea of the game) but Devon really wandered around. In fact, she was a bit fascinated with Liam standing in the corner and counting, so for much of the time, she stood next to Liam while he counted.

Finally Devon decided that she wanted a turn, so she stood in the corner and counted. She didn't get why she was supposed to cover her eyes, either, but after a little convincing, she did it. She is quite facile at counting to ten, but once she gets beyond that, the counting starts to get a little funny: fourteen, fiveteen, and a few other random numbers. Then when it was her turn to look, she got the idea of looking but didn't really know how to proceed. Elaine started calling out to her, and that helped her get a sense of where to go.

One of the interesting things was how obvious the "hiding" had to be for both Liam and Devon to find anyone. It was really a matter of hiding in plain sight, or at the minimum, making sure that at least something was visible. The idea of hiding and looking -- such as opening the door of a closet -- didn't seem to occur to either of them. We've played hide and seek a couple of times since, and Devon is cottoning on to the game more. Although she doesn't really get the concpet, she loves playing it. I remember that as well -- not at her age, of course, but I remember loving hide and seek in general and playing it both indoors and outdoors. I'm sure she'll get to that point, but there is certainly something magnetic about it for kids.