For each child there are very special, long-remembered events: being taught to swim by one's father, family picnics, trips into the world beyond city or country, going to the circus, a world's fair, a zoo or a fantasy land. There, also are the events of being loved and loving deeply, linked somehow with times of feeling unloved and unloving.
More than earlier, today there are multiple community groups for children where activities are guided and supervised. Within these situations and in the free play of neighborhood children, there is always the confusing, enlightening, and frequently distorted information gained through discovering your relationship with both boys and girls. Exploration by children into their sexual similarities and differences, a healthy pursuit, in the past more than today often aroused parental furor. Furor and different reactions from different involved parents lead to further child confusion and focus.
Within childhood peer relations there are games, play, and schoolwork that allow the child to come to know personally the meanings and feelings of competing, collaborating, fighting, winning, losing, destroying, building, aggression, passivity, constriction, freedom, and choice.
Then there is adolescence with all its moodiness, questions, fears, and experimenting related to adult modes of being. The moods are a mystery and the questions often unanswerable or the answers contradictory. Norman Kiell in _The Universal Experience of Adolescence_ says that as adults we forget the intensity, turmoil, and concretes of this period and that perhaps we have to.[7] Yet, it is not possible that the instability and discomfort of spirit lived in adolescence does not leave its ingrained tracing as part of our eternal presents.
When the focus of our responsibility shifts from play to work, during these early years of becoming, depends on our particular circumstances and abilities. For most persons there is a tipping of the balance between these. Hopefully neither extreme is the master. Fortunately, in many instances, as the child's work as been to play; the adult's work world, his world of responsibility is lived, experienced by him, to an extent as play--it gives satisfaction and pleasure.