Daddy Days: Playground personalities reveal themselves
If you’ve taken your kids to the playground more than once, you know there are some similarities between every playground visit. Someone always falls. Someone always loses a shoe. Someone always needs to go to the bathroom. And there is rarely a bathroom facility at the playground.
But there is also a consistency to the personality of the kids at the playground. I’m not saying every kid fits neatly into only one category. Or that there aren’t other categories and personalities. But my observations have led me to conclude these five personality types are present at pretty much every playground.
The Playground Introvert: This kid is at the playground but would rather not be. He hides behind his parents, or moves off to play alone and maybe scowls at kids who approach. This is also the kid who was likely playing loudly and energetically (alone) before the family with six kids shows up and invades his island paradise of a playground.
The Friend Maker: Do you want to be my friend? This kid gets right to the point. They’re here to play, they want you to play, too, and acquiescing to this most basic question gets the job done. Boom. You’re now friends. The friend maker may be spontaneous, “Come on, let’s play!” Or the friend maker may be more formulaic. I heard one friend telling her mom making friends is easy. All you do is 1) tell a kid your name 2) ask how old they are, and 3) ask how many teeth they’ve lost. Seems like as good a way to make friends as any.
The Tag-Along: The stereotypical tag-along is a younger sibling, and while that’s still compatible with my observations, there’s another type of tag-along that I think is even more common. This tag-along tends to be at the playground alone and likes to stick to a roving group of three or more kids. Since I almost always go to the playground with three or more kids perhaps I’ve had biased exposure.
But there’s something to this. I think a lot of tag-along kids don’t realize my kids are brothers and think a group of kids is playing and want to be part of the group. But the tag-along doesn’t introduce himself and just sort of roams slightly behind the groups as they run around the playground acting like they’re in the game of tag without actually being in it. Maybe that’s why they’re called “tag” alongs.
The Undeterred Friend Maker: This is sort of a hybrid personality of the friend maker and the tag-along. They’re going to be your friend whether you want to be their friend or not. They announce to their parents, “This is my friend!” and then work hard to prove that’s true. The friend maker asks the introvert if they want to be friends and leaves him alone when he doesn't. The undeterred friend maker assumes the introvert is already their friend and sticks to him like glue. I think a lot of these kids end up in sales jobs.
The Swing Kamikaze: And then there’s this kid. The name’s a bit misleading but this isn’t the kid in the swing. No, this is the kid, often just a toddler, who runs right at and in front of kids pulling six G's on a swing. I’ve had kids on both ends of this collision. Sometimes at the same time. It’s almost never the swinger’s fault. But they always feel bad and it usually takes a parent telling the kamikaze kid that they can’t be running in front of/behind the swings like that for the swinging kid to feel better about the whole thing.
This often doesn’t stop the toddler from continuing to scowl at the swinger. It’s hard for a toddler, who doesn’t understand concepts like momentum or pendulums, to think they’ve been anything but waylaid by a kid on a swing. However, it won’t be long until it all comes clear when they’re on the other side of that collision.
Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their six sons. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Daddy Days: Playground personalities reveal themselves
