View from a Prairie Home

By Hege Herfindahl, Columnist

The fourth! How I have come to love this holiday! Not only because I now am an American. Not only because I treasure all that our country stands for:  freedom of religion and speech, of movement and of how to celebrate; democracy; tolerance for others. I love it all. I love the diversity of our great nation; both of people, cultures and landscapes.

Yes, I love the fourth because of all that. And that is the way that I have always wanted our family to celebrate the fourth. Celebrate it in our own way with our own traditions. And we were free to create our own traditions when we first moved here, because where we lived before, in Norway, there was no 4th of July.

So we go to the lake, have a picnic and a water balloon fight. We swim and go boating and watch a parade. At night, we ooh over fireworks. But mainly, we just play.

Play. It means letting go of the organized and of the framework of norms imposed by others. It means letting imagination rule and go with it. For adults, it might mean feeling free like a child, letting go of boundaries. For a child, it is essential. 

To impose too much structure in a child’s life, to push a child to achieve before he or she is ready, has been found to stifle imagination and self-reliance. In play, a child gets to try out different roles. In play, a child learns to make decisions. In play, a child will see the relationships between cause and effect. In play, a child learns to think outside frames set by others. In play, a child gets to explore the world on his or her own terms.

I saw the effect of children who had been allowed to play freely in my high school foreign language classes. I taught my students a second language as much as possible like they were taught their first. With repetition. With songs. With conversations. Not with rules and drills. And when they were ready, I gave them a piece of paper and told them to write. Or I put them in groups and told them to have a conversation or make a skit. Some were afraid of making mistakes. But after a while, most were comfortable with the language. They didn’t speak it perfectly, but they spoke it.

I imagine the same is true for most situation we face as adults. Something unexpected happens. It always does. And we must face it. We must think of solutions. It might not produce perfect results, but we have dealt with it. Hopefully, we have also learnt from it.

Our founding fathers did the same. They saw a nation which needed guidance, which needed forming. And they wrote a declaration and a constitution. It was not perfect, but it has withstood the test of time, many difficult moments, when a weaker nation could have faltered.

My hope and prayer, is that our great nation will continue to do just that, withstand the test of all the unexpected difficulties that will happen. So, in our family, I think it very appropriate that we all, children and adults, celebrate the nation’s birthday with play.