OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Chutes and Ladders

August 4th, 2007

My older two boys almost wore out my patience with the board games designed for three and four year olds many many years ago — the ones with no reading involved, no counting higher than six, much less strategizing, bluffing or showing off vocabulary (too much online scrabble this week. lying next to my husband at bed at night with both our laptops open. makes me feel really old and married.) I’m talking about games that really require one skill and one skill only, taking turns. Not a small skill to develop, but once you’ve got it — hard to find the challenge. Still, today, we had a a child over to play with the older boys and my four year old was disconsolate at being left out so when he begged for me to play a boardgame with him we dragged out the Chutes and Ladders. Candyland is easier to cheat at, to sneak the kid cards so he can win quickly and you can do something else, but whatever.

I remember preferring Chutes and Ladders as a kid, and sat studying the pictures which are really nothing but little cartoon depictions of actions and their consequences. As a cute as the girl sweeping and getting to go the circus is, the boy riding his bicycle with no hands and getting a broken arm, it occurs to me these could use updating, things with a bit more moral sophistication. The thing is most squares would have both a ladder up and a chute down, that most behaviors have a risk that could go either way; the skateboarder could get a major contract with a gear company and he could end up with lots of broken bones, the cat rescuer may have a grateful cat and may also get scratched up and bitten trying to approach a panicked animal, you refuse to let somebody copy your homework in class and you don’t get in trouble in class (hopefully, though I can remember getting in trouble, unfairly, when someone else was talking to me) but you get beaten up at recess.

And no, that’s probably not the appropriate message you want to send your four year old. For now, I’ll let him believe that there are things that are clearly the right thing to do, things that are clearly the wrong thing to do. But I am moving away from layering my consequences on top of the inherent ones in his behavior.

For example, at the library last week, there was a child manning the treasure chest of small plastic trinkets to reward kids who had participated in the summer reading program, and my four year old went and picked one out, wanted it so badly, but had to put it back because we haven’t participated in the program. Part of it is that I am too lazy and too time-hungry to keep track of time my kids spend reading and being read too, but the other part of it is, as my ten year old came up and said in my voice, that “Reading should be its own reward.”

I really was impressed by the argument in Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards. I am even learning to trust that doing the wrong thing is its own punishment. This was part of the argument in Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, that the coercive carrots and sticks are not respectful and distract kids from the inherent consequences. It may be a fine line to walk, I am not abdicating my responsibility to be the one with an eye on long-term consequences, but I am working on getting the kids to understand consequences and to make decisions for themselves, especially on the relatively low-stakes stuff.

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