Posted 5:11 AM by Paul
Dolly Games

Both our girls ( 6 and 9) have spent the last week giving the lie to the often levelled charge that today's children lack imagination and creativity. With no encouragement from us, they have spent every available hour playing long complicated games with thier collection of dolls. This has included reading to them, giving them art classes and mediating conflicts caused by the naughty Bibbo. Bibbo is a doll.

All of this creativity despite the lure of 10 cartoon channels and the Internet. The oldest girl is even writing a long story about a fictional character called Sweety Bops and her menagerie of strange relatives and friends. These include The Kissy Mama, Fat Tony (who cooks cheesy mash with peanut butter for brekfast) and the hyper active Enid and Carpenter.

Neither of the girls has any interest in Britney Spears. They think that Christina Aguilera sings like a horse but have taking a liking to The White Stripes. We live in an inner city multi-racial part of London. We are comfortably off and the kids do not want for anything but they go to a local school with its fair share of problem kids. I am sure their are similar stories out there from couples bringing up kids in Brooklyn and Queens. Outside the world is changing but inside the kids are playing millenia old games based on imagination.

If some children are losing their innocence adults are destroying it rather than children abandoning it. If I hear another pundit start a sentence with "kids today" I will scream. It seems that each successive generation of 30-50 years indulges itself in the fantasy that their youthful experience was in some way historically unique and special. This is a form of vanity and a perrenial conceit. " In my day...." .

If there are problems with young people the blame should be laid fairly and squarely at our door. After all we created the complicated and frightening world they have to make sense of.