"It's Still Just a Game" (Aug. 2010)

A musing on modern sports and early childhood learning, or the joys of watching baseball with a toddler.

One gets quite a lot of exposure to play when living with a 3-year old. Watching the imagination develop, using symbolic associations, and just being around all that creative energy is both amusing and contagious.

I enjoy playing around, which to me is loosely defined as anything that’s not officially work! But I must admit I’ve grown quite jaded about what “games” we play nowadays, particularly in the billion-dollar industry of sports and the breathless "hyperdrive" 24/7 cable channels that fuels it. Modern baseball behemoths created through chemistry were tolerated if not encouraged because they filled seats. College athletics have ballooned into a business all about greed and not at all about academics. And the gruesome injuries seen on the football field on autumn weekends seem to make comparisons of players to war and gladiators perfectly acceptable as well. It’s hard to overlook the corrosion of games we loved to play as kids by the business and entertainment industries, remade to optimize their own profits.

But there too is the hard part – play is an essential part of being human, and games, competitive and otherwise, are building blocks of so much childhood learning. I’ve been rediscovering the joys of developing hand-eye coordination with a ball, or making up some silly game on the spot and improvising the rules as we go. And Madeleine likes baseball; she even knows about the once-in-a-lifetime phenom pitcher Stephen Strasburg who plays for the nearby Washington Nationals. We watch games now and again, and each time she learns a little more about the rules. And that we mute the TV when the commercials come on.

Much to the constant chagrin of humankind, othing in life is ever clean and neat, divided into black and white, good or bad. Perhaps my big dilemma is that teaching a child the basics involves simplifying things to exactly that – this is wrong, that is right – at the same time I find myself more deeply realizing how nothing really fits into that neat a box.

I comfort myself a little by remembering that this is really how we learn basics until we can handle the complexities that shades of grey bring; if a 1st-semester chemistry student had to wrap his mind around quantum states and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle it would likely be the end of any further interest in the subject.

So as I do my best to teach I try to let myself learn gently. It's ok to enjoy a baseball game, to talk about pitchers and gawk at Adam Dunn's frequent mammoth home run shots, and even to make up silly sayings about it as we go (a household favorite - "tell that ball to send a postcard when it lands!"). To enjoy the game is not to condone all the ugly details that go along with it, it's just enjoying the game. And perhaps one of the best things games can teach us in the long run is; relax, it's still just a game.