You Can’t Say You Can’t Play
Should kids be allowed to exclude other kids?
The third graders get to the point quickly. “Shirley is always rejected!” someone calls out and, before I realize what is about to occur, the group is awash in descriptions of the daily ordeals of an overweight, red-headed girl sitting directly to my left.
“In gym some girls scream and huddle under a blanket when she’s coming in and they say, ‘She’s coming! She’s coming!”
“They hide behind a tree and tease her. ‘You can’t even fit in here!’”
“They call her names.”
“No one wants to eat lunch with her.”
I motion for the children to stop. “Shirley, I’m sorry. Is this embarrassing you?”
Shirley surveys her classmates. “No, I want them to say it,” she replies calmly. “They do reject me.”
The above passage is a true story, in kids’ real words. The “I” here is the great Vivian Gussin Paley, in one of my all-time favorite books about children and belonging, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. I’ll be telling you all about this (very short, very readable) book today. But first, let’s acknowledge the terrible weight of the exchange you’ve just read and its potential echoes in our own lives.1
For me, Shirley’s exclusion hits on three levels. First, it stirs up my own frequent childhood memories of being rejected by peers. The pain of these experiences was shattering and incapacitating, and I’m still carrying some of the baggage to this day. (If you know, you know). Second, now that I’m an adult, the story activates worries about the kids I love – including those who might be actively excluding their peers, and especially those who are themselves experiencing peer rejection. (I know both. Many kids exclude sometimes and are at other times themselves excluded). Third, so much of the adult world is exclusionary and rejectiony and awful and getting awfuler. It’s like the world’s power brokers got away with hiding behind trees and yelling insults at other kids in third grade, and then never unlearned that cruelty.
Today I’m writing about You Can’t Say You Can’t Play because I think it offers fascinating, generative ideas for adults who are trying to teach the kids in our lives to welcome one another. The reality is that peer aggression and peer rejection are common behaviors among children, who learn to participate in the social world largely by experimenting and copying others. Their ability to empathize and put themselves in other people’s shoes is still developing.2 Exclusion, unfortunately, happens a lot, and it can be genuinely hard for adults to figure out how to respond. Heck, it can be difficult to even recognize when it’s happening – especially if kids don’t report it or if the kids in your life are the ones doing the excluding, rather than the ones being excluded. (They know enough to not want us to know). But if we can’t recognize exclusion or we don’t respond, the kids who excluded others in kindergarten might be acting pretty darn vicious by third grade, and if things continue along the same track, lord knows what will happen when they grow up and are elected to public office or start a tech company.
Paley’s book documents a novel approach to addressing kid-on-kid exclusion, which she conceived and tried out in her own kindergarten classroom. She had been wrestling with how to respond when her students excluded one another from their play. Under the “you can’t say you can’t play” rule, exclusion would no longer be allowed. Any child who wanted to join in other children’s play could do so.
Rather than just impose the rule, however, Paley spent months inviting her students to deliberate whether they should enact it – to weigh the merits and think through the angles.3 Not only that, she visited the school’s first grade and second grade and third grade and fourth grade and fifth grade classrooms, asked those kids what they thought, and then brought their ideas back to her (awe-struck by the big kids) kindergarteners, to fuel their deliberations. As she explained to students at the time, “you can’t say you can’t play” is “a plan but not a rule. We’re planning for it. We’re talking about it, getting opinions, thinking about it, wondering how it will work. I think that’s a good way to start a plan, if you’ve been doing something different all along.”
Now, some context: in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Paley taught at the famous University of Chicago Laboratory School.4 Founded in 1896 by our patron saint of democratic education, John Dewey, the Laboratory School was established so educational researchers could test hypotheses about how children learn in real time. A key proposition still being tested there to this day – with great results, by the way – is that kids learn better when they get to participate in meaningful decisionmaking about their own schooling (hence, “democratic education”). When Paley suggested her new rule to her kindergarteners and asked them to deliberate, she was doing democratic education with five-year-olds. It turned out they were totally up to the challenge.
In You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, Angelo and Clara are among the kindergarteners most routinely excluded in Paley’s classroom, and while it’s clear she has a warm spot in her heart for both, she also acknowledges the moral complexities of their behavior. Angelo in particular often gets into conflicts with his peers.
At the sand table, Waka is crying because Angelo either pushed or hit him, it is hard to tell. “He messed up my road on purpose!” Angelo yells. “Just ‘cause they don’t want me to play!”
“But look at Waka, Angelo. You made him cry.” My [voice] sounds angrier than Angelo’s outburst. “Don’t ever push or hit, Angelo, I’ve told you that.” There is no ambivalence on my part nor any effort to persuade. He runs to his cubby and suddenly I remember that Angelo never tells children they cannot play.
With Clara, meanwhile, it’s harder to tell where her classmates’ treatment of her is coming from. We certainly can’t conclude that they’re defending themselves by not wanting to play with her. Indeed, Clara being excluded is what precipitates Paley’s proposal of the new rule, “you can’t say you can’t play.” She brings it up to the whole class and here’s the conversation they have.5
“Something unhappy took place today in the blocks,” I tell the children at rug time. “I couldn’t decide what to do about Clara’s unhappiness.”
I have everyone’s attention. Like me, they yearn for explanations of sadness…. The children look at Clara to see if she is still sad. “A lot of you,” I continue, “think teachers always know what is right, but this time I don’t think the fair thing was done. You see, Clara was made to feel unwanted….
Shy Clara will speak for herself. “Cynthia and Lisa builded a house for their puppies and I said can I play and they said no because I don’t have a puppy I only have a kitty.” This is the longest sentence she has spoken in school to date. There is more to come. “They said I’m not their friend.” Clara hugs her tattered kitty and sniffs back her tears.
“We said if she brings a Pound Puppy she can play,” Lisa explains.
Nelson frowns, “Ben wouldn’t let me play.”
“Uh-uh, it was Charlie, not me,” Ben argues. “He was the boss.”
“Me neither they wouldn’t let me play,” Angelo mutters. “Nobody that keeps worrying me like that I don’t care about.”
The children have warmed to the subject. Being told you can’t play is a serious matter. It hurts more than anything else that happens in school, and distractions no longer work very well. Everyone knows the sounds of rejection: You can’t play; don’t sit by me; stop following us; I don’t want you for a partner; go away. These would be unforgivable insults if spoken at a faculty meeting, but our responses are uncertain in the classroom.
Even the victim does not know how to react. “I’ll tell my mommy if she could get me that kind of puppy like they have,” Clara offers.
“They has to let her play,” Sheila insists. “Unless they really don’t want to.”
“Unless she really really can’t find someone else to play with,” Cynthia adds, looking guiltily at Lisa.
Their ambivalence and mine are similar. “It’s a hard problem,” I agree, “and the same thing happens to other children every day.”
“To me,” Angelo says.
“Me too,” adds Nelson.
“And me.” It is Smita. I hadn’t realized Smita was having these problems. The rejected children know who they are, whether or not they tell us.
“When it happens to Clara she cries and sits in her cubby,” I say. “I found her there and we went to see the girls. Lisa said she didn’t want anyone else, that they didn’t need another person. But I said, ‘Clara needs you even if you think you don’t need her.’”
Cynthia lowers her eyes. “I wanted her to play.”
“But it was my game!” Lisa cries. “It’s up to me!” She is red-faced and tearful. “Okay, I won’t play then, ever!”
The children watch the participants in the drama. I continue the narrative. “So, I thought, I want to do a favor for Clara, but is it fair to spoil Lisa’s and Cynthia’s play? Yet would it really spoil their play? How?”
I’ve shared this conversation at length because I think interesting things are going on here. For one thing, the longer the conversation continues, the more kids chime in and name that exclusion is an issue for them too. For another, as the children “warm to the subject” they start surfacing the complexities that they’ll need to continue thinking through in future conversations: should the excluded child figure out how to comply with her peers’ expectations, as when Clara suggests she’ll ask her mother to buy her a Pound Puppy so she can play? Should it depend on how much the excluded child wants to play — or how much the other children want to exclude? Does it matter, as Paley suggests to the class, how being excluded makes the children feel? Do the children who exclude, like Lisa, have the right to make their own choices about who participates in a game they made up? The more ideas are brought into the conversation, the more all of the participants – the students and the teacher – get to develop their own ideas by responding to what others think. Throughout, I love how openly Paley both listens and shares. She doesn’t hasten to correct her students, just makes space for them to be heard; and she doesn’t mask her own feelings and confusion, but rather lets her students know what she’s wrestling with. Indeed, she elicits their help.
This is absolutely first-rate classroom deliberation best practice and some of the biggest names in the field of democratic education research have written about this little book because it’s so awesome.6 But I digress.
The other cool deliberative thing Paley does in this book is take the kindergarten plan to the older grades and collect their ideas to share with her own students. While she hopes to bring her class around to the “you can’t say you can’t play” rule, she also openly discloses the older kids’ arguments, both pro and con – some of which, in my view, are compelling. For example, after talking to the first graders she brings back a list of their main points:
Maybe the rule will cause fighting.
Maybe too many people will want to play.
Maybe someone will be mean to you.
Is it fair to tell someone he has to be a robber? [Note: the point of contention here is whether kids should be allowed to tell other kids they have to be the bad guy].
If you say no to one person, can you say yes to someone else?
If the owner says no, can another player still say yes?
Girls should be allowed to say only girls can play and boys should be allowed to say only boys can play, unless they’re very curious about each other’s play.7
I would now like to complain that writing about this book is hard because everything in it is fascinating and I want to talk about all of it. Idea #7 alone! So much to explore!
Suffice it to say, for now, that there really are legit complexities around the fairness, or not, of “you can’t say you can’t play.” And with each new conversation with an older grade, Paley surfaces more considerations and gray areas to bring back to her kindergarteners.
Now, because I’m on team “this rule is fair,” or at least team “mostly fair” – and I suspect a lot of Auntie Bulletin readers will agree with me – at this point let me surface more of the counterarguments that gave me pause.
“What if a person doesn’t play fair?” asks a 5th grader. “Why should he be protected? I mean, even if he doesn’t have friends he still has to act nice, doesn’t he?”
“It’s hard for that rule you made up to work because there could be more fights, not less fights,” suggests a 1st grader. “See, if someone says you can’t play and then there is a rule, so they begin to fight about the rule.”
“Some kids aren’t nice enough to play with,” says kindergartener Lisa. “They’re too – uh, rough, I mean, too sad.” (Note the clear evidence here that Paley has been talking with her students about why kids might act rough).
And here’s Paley’s own interrogation of the rule: “Can this kind of morality be legislated? What about that other moral imperative: the right to choose one’s companions, unpressured and unopposed?”
In kindergarten through 4th grade, Paley reports, many kids argue, essentially, that the rule is fair in theory but it couldn’t actually work. In 5th grade, students say the rule could work for younger grades, but by their own age level it’s too late to impose a new rule. Across grade levels, the kids who tend to argue that the plan is fair and could work are, of course, the ones most consistently excluded. “Yet in each class there seems to be a hopefulness,” Paley reflects. “A light shining, a dream they could invent… a place where you are always asked, ‘Do you want to play?’”
What Paley wants, and what I want – and what, perhaps, you are wanting – is for the kindergarteners to finally and enthusiastically agree, after all these deliberations, that they should impose “you can’t say you can’t play” upon themselves. However, they never do arrive at consensus and Paley starts to feel she’s dithering, avoiding acting on her convictions. She finally decides to impose the rule and see what happens.
The children stare at the sign on the wall above the piano as I point to each word. “YOU CAN’T SAY YOU CAN’T PLAY. There. Our new rule. In big letters. We’ve been talking about it and now it’s time to do it.”
The children are uneasy, looking at each other. The announcement seems too abrupt, though we’ve been preparing ourselves for weeks. “Here’s an example of what the rule means,” I say. “Remember when Lisa and Cynthia told Clara she couldn’t play because she didn’t have a puppy? And –”
“And Ben wouldn’t let me in the dinosaur club,” Angelo calls out.
“And Smita said I couldn’t sit next to her,” Clara recalls.
“Well, Sheila wouldn’t be my partner either that time,” Smita answers, in justification.
The children do not need examples from me. I smile encouragingly. “Now we’ll know what to do when these things happen. You see, the rule probably won’t keep them from going on, but it will tell us what is the fair thing to do when they happen.”
“It’s not fair at all,” Lisa pouts. “I thought we were only just talking about it. I just want my own friends. What if someone isn’t nice and hits me?”
“Lisa, we understand how you feel. But you’ll always be able to play with the children you like best. Nothing changes about that. And we already have a rule about hitting. You remember what that is, don’t you?”
Charlie speaks up, “If you hit once it could be a mistake or an accident. But if you hit again you have to leave the game.”
Lisa is not impressed. “There’s some people I don’t like.”
“You don’t like me,” Angelo says without emotion, and everyone looks at him as if acknowledging the sad truth of his statement. Very well, let this be the test: When Lisa accepts Angelo into her play or story, it will be a sign that the rule is working. Meanwhile I’ll demonstrate my belief that the rule is fair for everyone equally.
Alright, so do you want to know how it went?
Answer: pretty good actually! Paley reports that she and her teaching assistant are shocked by the ease of the transition. After a week, there have been “only minor mishaps, quickly resolved…. When the children are reminded of the rule they comply so readily it is as if they’ve been rescued. From what? Perhaps from the ordeal of deciding whether or not someone can play.”
Lisa, Paley reports, continues to be the class barometer, frequently both policing other students’ adherence to the rule and talking with Paley about how the rule makes her feel. She and her circle of on-again, off-again friends test out the edge cases. On one occasion, she proposes that kids who “really really really want to play so much” can be allowed to play, but only if they agree to take the part that the “person in charge” wants them to have – for example, kids who want to play against others’ will must be willing to be assigned the role of the bad guy. On another occasion, when Cynthia is dismissive of Lisa’s toy, Lisa wonders, “is that the same as against the rule?” Cynthia tries playing with different friends on different days, “so I tell Lisa I’ll play with her tomorrow.” (Paley calls this “dispensing separate but equal opportunities for play”). Lisa tells secrets to Mary Louise but not Cynthia. Is that against the rule? In the bathroom, Hiroko overhears Cynthia and Lisa saying that Hiroko stinks. Is that against the rule? Paley tells the aggressors, “You both hurt her feelings. It’s the same as telling someone ‘We don’t like you, you’re not nice enough to play with.’”
Over time, Lisa starts to more consistently include Hiroko, Clara, Angelo, and others with whom she had not previously been willing to play. It’s not a grand overnight transformation, but rather a slow transition. The edge cases start to get worked out. Paley concludes that it’s “the habit of exclusion that grows strong” – and it’s a habit that can also be weakened, untangled, unlearned. By the end of the story, Paley marvels at Lisa’s growth: “She is really quite remarkable, I think.”
I think it’s worth exploring “you can’t say you can’t play” as a potential rule with the kids in your own life. There are so many possible permutations, and boy would it be interesting to enlist the kids you love in figuring them out. For example, what about in a single household, among a single set of siblings? Under what circumstances, if any, might it make sense to impose this rule? Given kids’ completely legitimate need for downtime and personal space, when would it be appropriate to make exceptions? What about during a neighborhood kid hangout? What about if one kid was invited over to play and now other kids are inviting themselves in? What about in a scouts den or sports team or theater ensemble? How could the rule be applied or adapted in those settings? What about in a classroom? I suspect that the more often we bring up this question with the kids in our lives, the more nuances will emerge, the more specificity (and necessary exceptions) we might identify and think through together, and the greater buy-in might emerge over time. Writing this post has set me to raising the conversation with the kids in my life, and so far, so interesting. I’m eager to keep exploring.
And wow, imagine if whole communities – if our whole society – were willing to genuinely experiment with welcoming our neighbors. How transformative that could be!
Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin
Auntie Collective Wisdom
Full disclosure, there have been times in my life when I was intimidated by teenagers – partly because they were sometimes mean to me when I was one. Becoming a high school teacher cured me of my fear of teens, but many adults who don’t have regular contact with teenagers tend to be low grade intimidated by them. For November, I’m planning a crowdsourced post tentatively titled “Don’t Fear the Teens,” in which we draw on the wisdom of our community to surface everything we know about building loving, supportive, fun relationships with the teenagers in our lives.
So I’m running yet another survey (because you know I love a survey). This time I want to know:
Have you ever felt nervous about interacting with teenagers?
What have you learned about how to connect with them?
What’s a positive memory of connecting with a teen in your life?
What advice do you have for adults who feel low-grade intimidated by teenagers?
What do you still want to learn?
Be warned, these are open-ended questions, so they’ll take a little more thought and time. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I’ve actually asked you.
I’ll be collecting your ideas all this month. Click below to share your perspective – and be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin!
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Let’s acknowledge that third grader Shirley is a badass. What courage to welcome this open discussion of her treatment at the hands of her classmates! As Shirley’s brave response suggests, the public acknowledgement of what’s been happening often feels to victims like such a relief.
I have a niece, now 22 years old, who’s been kind and generous and a total sweetheart since babyhood. She’s absolutely lovely, but she’s not normal. While some people are born gentle souls, the rest of us have to learn to be kind and empathetic – largely by experiencing the natural social consequences, from kids and adults alike, when we aren’t.
Let me put on my democratic educator hat for a second and point out that the word “deliberation” comes from the Latin root libra, “to weigh.” When we deliberate with others, we are collectively weighing our options.
Over her decades at the Laboratory School, Paley wrote more than a dozen short, wise, accessible, often funny books about what she was learning in her preschool and kindergarten classrooms. When she died at age 90 in 2019, education professor and Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers wrote an appreciation: “Vivian was filled with wonder – the impression she gave was one of an all-consuming, undisguised curiosity rarely seen in an adult – and her awe and admiration spill onto every page.” What I’m saying is that Paley is a matriarch of our lineage, Aunties. I personally have learned so much from her about listening closely to children and genuinely including them in decisionmaking when suitable. Her influence is everywhere in The Auntie Bulletin.
Paley audiorecorded conversations in her classroom and the other grades’ classrooms. Many of the conversations in this book are direct transcriptions of what she and the kids said.
If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of deliberation in public school classrooms, check out Walter C. Parker’s Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life or Diana Hess’s Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussions. Both are approachable and very interesting and these two authors are foremost in the field of democratic education research for a reason. You’ll also find discussions of You Can’t Say You Can’t Play in both books.
Today, more than three decades after this book was published, many teachers would help their students frame ideas about gender somewhat more expansively. Nonetheless, the qualifier “unless they’re very curious” adds a lot of flexibility for the gender non-conforming kids of 1992. I feel like Paley knew what was up.
Hey,
This is so interesting and I’m torn by it. I haven’t come across any of this stuff before.
On the one had, I was one of the excluded kids in school. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes because there was a habit of exclusion, and sometimes because I was excluded so I didn’t know how to act when I was included. I wish that “you can’t say you can’t play” had been a rule when I was in school. Along with, maybe, having some other way of picking teams than having all the kids line up and captains take turns picking who they want until one kid is left standing there who the captains argue about not wanting on either of their teams.
On the other hand, I have a kid who has been pulled into games that shouldn’t be played (one called “mean police”) where five year olds are holding down other kids and hurting them. My kid is pulled into these games by other kids who don’t like it when they are told “no”. I don’t want to imagine what things are like for these kids outside of school for them to be bringing this stuff to the playground, but, also, this isn’t a game that should be tolerated at school.
For me, my first reaction was that I think that the rule might need to have two parts: 1) you can’t say “you can’t play”, and 2) you can say “I don’t want to play”.
But, I’m not sure about the second part, because “I don’t want to play” can quickly become “you can’t play” if it’s used in a way that stops the game from happening at all if an excluded kid tries to join in.
I guess, for me, that the context would matter for this rule and it’s something that should only be introduced in a basically safe setting. Are the games generally positive and healthy to the kids? Then, sure, everyone should be included. But, if the games are hurtful, then there’s something there that needs to be worked on before this rule can be introduced (which looks like is what happened in the book as there was already a rule about not hurting).
My kids have landed on the rule "you can play with just one special person, but you can't play with more than one person and exclude anybody". That is, either it's a private duo or it's open to all. It is...sometimes effective.