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Main Page Site Index Getting Pregnant Pregnancy Parenting Pregnancy and Parenting Journals Fertility Nutrition Pregnant Moms Morning Sickness Women's Health Child Health	by Jonathan Kronstadt Here's a tiny slice of hell from your past: an SAT-like analogy question. Office is to adult as ____ is to child. Answer: no, not potty training. The answer is playground. All of you who got it right can send your children to Stanford on scholarship for having such smart parents. As for the rest of you, can you say "community college?" I think you can. For kids, playing is their job, and the local playground is their office. Think about it. It's where they learn all of the virtues, character flaws, and skills necessary to become an effective drone or queen bee in the adult hive of work. Take, for example, ambition. It's easy to see who are the risk-takers at any given playground. They're the ones who grab for that extra rung, who even though they may wind up with a faceful of wood chips, climb back up and push their reach beyond their grasp once more. They go up the slide the wrong way, swing standing up, and careen from one piece of equipment to the next like contestants on American Gladiators. Or team-building. Kids actually invented this concept and then, as we do with everything else, adults co-opted it. We've refined it from lining kids up against a fence and actually choosing one's favorites--a cruel but emotionally honest method--to hiring facilitators at thousands of dollars a day to discover why our colleagues can't share company toys effectively and secretly harbor homicidal fantasies about one manager or another. With kids team-building is more physical--they drag each other around by limbs and clothing to foster team unity. Time management. Watching my daughter for three years has convinced me that procrastination is nature not nurture. Some might say this is a convenient, self-serving conclusion, given my own rather Herculean prowess in this area, but I say let's not confuse the issue. Kids, like adults, stink at time management. They play and play and play, seemingly with no agenda and oblivious to impending darkness, supper, or parental head explosion. Then you either say it's time to go home or, if you've read too many parenting books, give them a five-minute warning. They immediately scramble around in a vain attempt to wring maximum fun out of every available apparatus while simultaneously whining about the wretched unfairness of it all. It would be a performance worthy of praise if it weren't so damn annoying. But kids know how squeeze the most out of whatever life chucks their way. I used to work at a movie theater candy counter during an extended showing of Benji. Kids would take all of their money out, count it, then figure out what configuration of confections would render them moneyless. I don't think it mattered whether or not they liked the candy they bought, only that they got as much candy as possible with the money they had, because, well, you can't eat money. Unless you're like my daughter and put everything in your mouth. Hey, next to a handful of sand a little loose change is good eatin'. Yes, she eats sand. It's truly painful to watch, and tends to weaken my case that she is exceptionally bright. I imagine that if, on an application to a gifted and talented school program one listed "eats sand" under hobbies it might throw up a red flag. But at least she stopped eating wood chips a while back, which is a clever writer's way of getting back to the main focus of this piece--the playground. She will suck on the odd slide now and again, but I think it's more nostalgic than Freudian. It's amazing that anyone born before 1970 is still alive, considering the death traps that passed for playgrounds back then. Square iron jungle gyms left me and my little buddies dangling precariously above concrete floors. If we didn't crack our heads open falling off one of them we'd likely either be sent into orbit by or crushed underneath one of those metal roundabouts, onto which we would try to lure younger, scared-of-speed kids to help them learn about abject terror. Nowadays plastic, wood and rubber have replaced iron, steel and concrete. Fortunately, playground interpersonal dynamics haven't changed a bit. Neither, for the most part, have gender differences, despite the best intentions of a generation of parents who believed they were giving birth to human blank slates and who threw away the pink and blue chalk in favor of taupe. I too was one of these until I watched, over and over again, how girls bounded out of the local pre-school hand-in-hand, skipping and singing, while boys emerged like caged beasts, picked up the first stick they could find and whacked the first thing they could reach. Girls will be socially cruel, publicly humiliating and isolating each other from the group, but you don't get the sense that would really be better off going through life wearing helmets. Which brings us to another office/playground analogy: hostile takeovers. Nuff said, don't you think? This work is copyrighted by the author, Jonathan Kronstadt. Reproduction of any kind is prohibited with out the express consent of the author. Please feel free to let Jonathan know what you think of his work by sending him an email.