Childishness As Resistance

Rediscovering, redefining and reclaiming play.

They have a ‘child-like’ playfulness. I’ve heard this said about people, sometimes people have said it about me. It is said as a compliment, usually, although it can be used to patronise and put down. That’s when ‘child-like’ becomes ‘childish’. A few letters between being perceived as adorable or pathetic.

Why have we been raised to believe that play belongs exclusively to children? It fits the colonised narrative for us to believe that play is a temporary need that gets replaced by ‘adult things’ like extractive labour and heteronormative relationships and reproduction, and our once expansive desire to explore, discover, learn and create through play can be squashed into ‘hobbies’ for those who are wealth and time privileged enough to access them.

Western concepts of play for children are centred around safety and artifice. We give children brightly coloured, loud, often over-stimulating toys and we don’t let them get anywhere near risk or exhilaration - key components in many Indigenous concepts of play. Part of being indoctrinated by colonialism involves learning not to trust ourselves or our environments, we must only trust authority and the different guises it takes over the course of our lives - parents, teachers, bosses, government, law enforcement. We are told to trust these entities even in the face of lived experience that tells us we shouldn’t, or at the very least that we should be including our own judgement rather than relying entirely on theirs. The exploratory, independent and risky outdoor play that teaches us to trust ourselves is largely reserved for wealthy white folks who own acres of land. That process of being connected and learning to live in balance with your natural environment is now a privilege, with working class folx of all colours being palmed off with earth-polluting plastic and genocide-produced technology instead. Playing outside becomes risky for human-created reasons: traffic, child predators, and if you are visibly Black or Global Majority - police.

Despite these barriers and inequalities- children will find all sorts of ways to access play. We are wired to find self-directed ways to explore and learn and build integrated connections in our brains that help us navigate our surroundings, create and express ourselves, and activate our reward pathways. And we encourage children to do this. It is once we perceive that childhood is fading and adulthood must be embraced, that we cease to abide ‘childlike’ levels of play, despite the fact that we continue to have this need as adults.

Neurodivergent adults are often very in touch with our need to play. Special interests can start in childhood and last a long time, so it makes sense that we may enjoy playing with toys that we loved as children well into our teens and maybe for our whole life. I played with barbies until I was in high school and I don’t remember actually wanting to stop, but I know that at sleepovers other children let me know it was ‘weird’. I was raised in the city but lucky enough to have a garden. Our garden had a swing and toys and I would play with them, but the most joyful memories I have are when I would climb through the gap in the fence into the neighbour’s garden. It was wild and wonderful, it had tall grass that went over my head, and in the summer it was full of brambles - I would come back with scratches on my arms and legs, a belly full of blackberries and the kind of contentment and satisfaction that only adventure can yield. The only time I’ve come close to that feeling as an adult is when I visited Scotland, and I was delighted to discover their ‘right to roam’ law which states that everyone has the right to be on land for recreational purposes and to cross land for this purpose - no matter who the land ‘belongs’ to.

White-washed wellness has us well versed in the idea that adults need play in our lives, it’s just done in such a way that it can be used and weaponised against us. There are books and articles about how to bring more play into our lives, what they imply but don’t explicitly say it that it must be used to relieve the heaviness and depression that accompanies trying to navigate the constructed environment we live in because it is so unsuitable for human fulfilment and contentment. The idea being that if you can bring silliness and play into your life, you can find enough energy and enthusiasm to keep running on that hamster wheel the other 90 hours of the week. Play should not be an antidote to an accepted oppression, but rather a path to liberation.

Play is regulating. Play helps us learn. Play helps us connect with ourselves, and with each other and our oneness with our environment. Play connects us to the joy of being alive. Play is joy. The concept of joy as resistance shared by Black educators such as Audre Lorde and Toi Derricotte is widely referenced in liberatory work. If we reconcile play as joy in our minds, there are two things that we can challenge in order to embrace play as resistance; a) the stigma around adults accessing play that is considered ‘childish’ and b) the colonial instruments of play that we were raised with to keep us compliant and complicit, in place of the nature-based exploration that helps us develop life skills, sense of self, agency and a deep connection to and respect for our planetary kin. It may seem that these are two opposing actions, given that many adults will desire play through the colonial means we grew up with and might be wholly disconnected from our ancestral ways of play. However, we can choose to embrace our desires for play as they are - using non-new toys so as not to add to the damage to our earthly siblings, while consciously and intentionally divesting from colonial constructs of play through reconnection to each other and our planet. This is how we carry out the inner and outer work of neuro-embodiment and decolonisation. Like so many other truths, we can hold both.

And we can play in the footsteps of our ancestors while we do it.

-- AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• What types of play hold the happiest memories for you? Would they bring you joy if you did them today? How can you find ways to find out? Challenge any judgement or embarrassment that comes up for you, try to tend to your ‘childishness’ with the love and acceptance you would give to a child.

• Do you think of others as childish for some of their ways of playing? How can you challenge this in yourself, and in discussions with others?

• How can you divest from colonial constructs of play that involve harming our kin through pollution and violence? How can you access nature-based, risk and exhilaration focused play? For you, for children in your life? What choices can you make that will shift us towards this for future generations?