The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World
By Susan Linn
The New Press
257 pp $24.95

You have to take seriously anyone who plays with puppets for a living.

Susan Linn's puppets inspire a great deal of passion in children, and her latest book, The Case for Make Believe, is a bid to fan the same fervor in adults.

You might think that with snow leopards disappearing, polar bears dwindling, and giant pandas practically extinct, children's play would be way down on the list of endangered species.

But not by psychologist Linn's reckoning. Her premise is simple: Normal, unstructured play for children is being rapidly replaced by time spent staring at screens, starting in infancy. Play, Linn says, is essential to children's development as fully formed human beings, and the more time they spend at video games or passively in front of televisions instead of creating and using their imaginations, the greater the danger to their well-being.

"I feel a sense of urgency -- the kind of urgency that environmentalists feel about saving the rain forest -- about preserving time and space for children to play," she writes. "Next to love and friendship, the traits that play nurtures -- creativity and the capacity for making meaning -- constitute much of what I value most about being human, yet they have been devalued to the point of endangerment."

The Case for Make Believe is not another screed against television but a call to arms. A cofounder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and author of the book Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood, Linn sounds the alarm here on similar themes: Some of today's children barely know how to play without an action figure and a script -- and without the ability to pretend, to let their fantasies run wild, they are missing out on becoming imaginative adults able to puzzle out problems on their own.

She tells, for example, the story of 7-year-old Annie, whom she visits in the hospital. The sick child is trying to put together Lincoln Logs from a kit. Unlike the Lincoln Logs of the past, which were, frankly, just a bunch of lumber, the logs from this kit can be made into only three possible buildings. Annie is frustrated because she's having trouble building to specifications. If she were an engineer, it would be one thing; but she's a second-grader.

"A worrisome consequence of a commercialized play environment is that we begin to distrust children's capacity for imaginative play," Linn writes. "We start to believe that they aren't capable of generating constructive activity on their own. What's at risk is no less than the development of essential life skills -- including the essential capacities to look to themselves for generating amusement, and to soothe themselves when they are stressed."

Of course readers have to decide whether to trust Linn: She's a grown-up woman who spends much of her time talking to a rust-colored duck named Audrey. Linn, Audrey Duck, and a cast of myriad puppet characters provide play therapy for children in crisis. Now a psychologist at Judge Baker Children's Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Linn went on the road as a ventriloquist in her youth but in time discovered that her puppets could be put to better use providing therapy for kids. In her career, she has found, appallingly, that many children don't even know how to play -- unless they are holding a cartoon character and re-enacting a scene from an animated film.

Many of Linn's patients are severely traumatized children. They have AIDS or other serious illnesses; they've lost parents or been abused by parents. Some of them are kids in normal circumstances who are dealing with a particular trauma. She tells their stories and shows us how children use play with her puppets to express emotions they could not otherwise vent.

In a way, Linn has almost written two separate books: one that argues against the corporate takeover of play and one that demonstrates how a skilled therapist can coax a troubled child to open up using puppets and other forms of therapy.

Her engrossing real-life stories are meant to show us how children use play therapy to cope. But as a parent, I found myself wondering periodically what the average reader was supposed to take away from the therapy stories. Linn also tends to repeat herself. About a third of the way into the book, we are very clear on why she believes children's play is endangered by the Mattel-itary Industrial Complex. It seems pretty obvious, but Linn keeps arguing the case as if we can't see it all around us.

She can also be a bit short on data. She criticizes the Teletubbies program for babies as practicing "deceptive marketing," noting that it racked up $1 billion in licensed paraphernalia by 2007. The deception? The show was supposed to facilitate infant language development. We may assume the show fell far short of that lofty mark (I personally found it unbearable, and so did my kid), but Linn offers no proof.

The author's work is much stronger when she talks about the staggering piles of money that corporations are making from our kids' playtime. She also offers much to back up the effects of violent images on boys and fairy-tale princess imagery on girls, both stoked by -- you guessed it -- the children's media industry.

She's opposed to gratuitous violence, not the kind that older children can benefit from seeing in films like Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda. But she bristles when people use the educational value of a film like Schindler's List as an argument against regulating advertising of explicitly violent media.

"Unlike Transformers, for instance, Schindler's List wasn't advertised during television programming for preschoolers on stations like Nickelodeon," she writes. "It didn't premiere in movie houses heralded by a host of Nazi action figures, Holocaust-themed junk food, and a promotional deal with Burger King. It wasn't marketed to children."

In the end, we all have to decide what limits we'll set on our kids' exposure to mass marketing. Linn offers us a thoughtful book that may indeed change how we view our children's play and where we draw the line.

-- Elaine Herscher is senior managing editor at Consumer Health Interactive and co-author of Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Epidemic of Obesity (Perseus paperback, 2006).

First published June 18, 2009
Copyright © 2009 Consumer Health Interactive

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