Avoiding Adult Fantasies

[Kim B Lynn]

Hello,

How do you approach make believe and fantasy with your montessori kiddos? From my understanding it's fine to let kids engage in imaginative play, but that imposing adult fantasies on the child (like disney stories, cartoons, dragons, faries or other adult generated ideas) should wait until the child is older.

If you try to "keep it real" in your house, how does your spouse, parents, family, friends react? How do you explain it in a way that they'll understand? Are you worried about them getting teased socially if they don't know who Dora the explorer is? Do other people get them books and movies as gifts that you don't like?

My kiddo is still a baby, so we're not dealing with it YET...but I know it's coming up soon. I worry about how to explain to my hubby that I don't want him to have Spiderman toys, or telling Grandma that we don't teach Santa Claus, or letting him watch Toy Story with his cousins.

Am I taking things a bit too far by not wanting this for him?

[jenfl]

We do Montessori education at home but don't go as far as limiting imaginitive play or specific types of imaginitive play. I'm not sure, in this day and age, that you can totally avoid those things even if you wanted to. My daughter watches hardly any TV (averaging an hour every few months, maybe?), but many of those characters she's exposed to through daily life (walking through Target, visiting other kids, etc). I also think it's a fight I'd rather just not have with the grandparents.

[lach]

I'm not sure I've ever heard that Montessori thought that you should actively withhold this stuff. I think that Montessori thought that kids couldn't quite grasp fantasy until they had figured out reality, and that the best fantasy play is rooted in reality. I tend to agree with that (and I think that most science fiction authors do, too). But that doesn't mean that you can't immerse them in fantasy: you just need to have reasonable expectations of what they'll grasp and what they'll be able to do with it. So I don't think that you should necessarily worry about these issues from a Montessori perspective.

That said, we don't do branded characters because I don't like cradle to grave marketing trends and I don't like my toddlers being consumers. So for us it's definitely not a Montessori thing. I do encourage imaginative play, and read my kids fairy tales and all that. We absolutely do Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I really can't claim to be a Montessori expert, but I will say that I've never heard of withholding Santa from kids for Montessori reasons.

As to your questions, it's hard but not impossible. I don't talk about it with people except for my parents and my inlaws, who are understanding and agree with me. There have been a few Dora/Princess gifts that never made it to my daughter (I put them in the closet and donated them to Toys for Tots last Christmas). This year is her first birthday where I probably won't be able to do that, but I'm fairly impressed that I've made it this far. She was 2.5 before she knew who Elmo was, and she still doesn't know who Dora is or any of the Disney Princesses. There hasn't been any teasing (yet). Weirdly enough, the only problem we've had is at the doctor, dentist, and ER. They use all this character crap to calm kids down, and then get frustrated when DD just stared at them and didn't know how to answer any of their "who's this? Who's this?" questions.