watching children play: toward the earth in bliss

Watching children play is a favorite pastime for many elderlies. However, due to the growing safety concerns, parents have become increasingly resistant to the idea of having strangers watch their children at parks and playgrounds. This creates an intergenerational gap in communication with potentially detrimental consequences for all social groups. Oral interviews were conducted and written surveys distributed that validated the hesitance of seniors, especially in the United States, to spend time at childrens playgrounds despite their finding the vicinity of children stimulating. Behavioral observations were conducted at playgrounds in Irvine, California, to quantify the positive and the negative effects of supervisors' ages on childrens play and thus indirectly assess whether there could be mutual benefits of making the presence of older people at playgrounds, which is customary in many countries, more culturally acceptable. Observations focused on the behavior of a pair of siblings showed that there was an increased probability of both conflicts and joyful expressions when the children were in the presence of a middle-aged person than when they were watched over by the elderlies. This has suggested that freer expressions stimulated in the presence of parent-like figures simultaneously induce the undesired and the desired behavioral patterns in the form of propensities for conflict and propensities for expressions of joy, respectively. This has confirmed that the observational stance has a critical effect on the observational outcome and that the age of the watchers has an effect on the behavior of children at play, with the age correlating directly with the calmness of the play, but also with a lower degree of exhilaration. To give a genuine account of a scientific study on childrens play, the paper adopts an innovative form, combining rigorous analytics with a poetic triptych that places real-life children characters onto the central stage of the discourse.