Battle and Walden – rough and tumble play

Marc:  I’ve been in the field for a while and when I first did rough and tumble play with school-agers, mostly young school-agers there was very clear rules that boys only wrestle boys and girls that they even wrestle, they would wrestle.  Now we just did a little risk project with a school-age program here in Winnipeg and they were wrestling and they were pushing each other off of this picnic table on top of snow and I noticed that there were girls up there and the boys would get up there and they’d fight them and they’d wrestle them, right.  So after that one little wrestle match we sat down with them and I went up to the young boy, because this is out of my culture, you know, being a 50-year-old man.  I said, “Is it appropriate to wrestle girls?”  And he goes, “If they’re the same size all fair is fair.”  You know that’s absolutely beautiful because when we think about pre-school kids, developmentally, that’s when they’re starting to develop that stereotype around genders.  And if we were in a program without risk, how would we ever learn what the possibilities of a girl is, right? – within that play, because what happens when we deny them that risk and that opportunity to take that chance, they fall in to these rigid gender roles. 

Melinda:  Another thing I’ve noticed too is when children are wrestling they size the other person up. I’ve had a child who – we’re like, “Who do you want to wrestle?” and one of the ECEs said, “Oh, I’ll wrestle you.” And he looked at her and she’s like, “No – but I’ll wrestle this guy.”  So they know who they want to wrestle and based upon their size usually or their ability sometimes.