primitive feeling of kinship, if it could be preserved, would probably make our relationship with nature more reasonable.

There, in the village, Ksenya still did not distinguish herself from the objects surrounding her. This happened later, when she learned to call herself "Usha" (from "Ksyusha"). “Usha sat down,” “Usha went,” she commented on her actions. And finally, holding the cube in her hands, she said: "Mine." The cube belonged to her, helped to distinguish herself from the outside world. The cube was an improvised material, a tool of labor. Using it, she asserted herself in the circle of people and in a number of those things that had not yet lost their spirituality for her.

Now she, through the word "mine", explored her relationship with objects and people. She pulled the handkerchief off the chair, saying: "My!" "This is my mother's scarf," Vera Ivanovna clarified. Ksenka approached her mother, tightly clutching her hem with her hand: "My mother." "Yours, yours," Vera Ivanovna confirmed. "Mine," Ksenya continued, shaking her mother's handkerchief in her other hand, which was dragging along the floor. "And mother's handkerchief," Vera Ivanovna objected again. Ksenya looked inquiringly at her grandmother, then at her mother, and said thoughtfully, as if hesitating: "My mother." And again, waving her handkerchief, watching how it wriggles, flickers with a motley end at her feet, she confidently added: "Mine." Well, of course, since her mother, then the scarf, too!

In the end, she established: mom and dad, grandparents belong undividedly to her. So, everything that they take in their hands should also belong to her. However, the behavior of adults was extremely illogical: either they rejoiced at her every word and movement, or they frowned, hiding shiny, irresistibly attractive objects from her. The injustice also consisted in the fact that four adults, as she understood, not only belonged to her - they existed for her sake: they worried when she was ill, calmed and beamed when she was well. The contradictions in their behavior revolted her!.. Weeping was heard...

“Here are the results of your upbringing,” Vera Ivanovna accused us.

- The second is necessary, - Baba Glasha sternly asserted, - until this one is completely spoiled.

- To spoil the second? I answered. - Then after all, all attention will be to the smallest!

“You don’t understand anything,” Maxim Petrovich said, rolling a shiny ball in his palm in front of Ksenka’s face. - We need to get down to business. Really, Xenia?

He took her to another room, and our discussion flared up with renewed vigor: we need to accustom Xenia to the word "no" ...

Or maybe it’s better for the first simple duties, for example, to clean up toys? To accustom her to the idea that she, too, should take care of adults ... And explain why you can’t take scissors or a knife.

My attempts to explain - I noticed later - backfired. Her interest in forbidden things skyrocketed! Saved here only grandfather's technique - a distraction with another subject. But the consciousness that she is the center of the universe remained. She did not know how, could not yet feel the other person as something separate, independent. The adult responded to her "give", to her tears or laughter, and she did not suspect that he might have his own desires.

How to teach her to understand another person? But why does it have to be taught? Shouldn't she acquire this skill herself, in communication, perhaps even in conflict, with us?

Somehow we played with her. On my hand I have a mitten doll. This is Thumbelina, whom Ksenya calls briefly Dimona. We water imaginary flowers. We go to the corner of the room, where an imaginary tap opens (I noisily imitate the sound of pouring water - Ksenka laughs). We return. Halfway through, Dimonya remembers: she forgot to turn off the faucet. Water floods the floor.

Ksenka, shouting "Ah! Ah!", runs into the corner, looking frightened at her feet, turns on the tap and, happy, clubfoot back.

We water the garden. Flowers, of course, immediately grow. Ksenya brings an imaginary bouquet to her mother and looks intently as she sniffs them, as she smiles, as she shows her grandmother Vera (she is busy, dismisses: “No time!”), Grandpa Maxim (he admires: “What beautiful flowers!”).

Xenia is happy. Her face is like that of a person who has finished a great job, fraught with risk (almost flooded with water!), And requiring great patience (after all, the game lasted for twelve minutes, it's a lot for her!).

So, maybe in the game and through the game to give the knowledge of life, the knowledge of people, which it acquires by conflicting with us? The game will remove negative emotions, make you experience the joy of discovery. It will teach you to be, as it were, in two planes at the same time - in the imagination and in life. This, by the way, will help her eventually develop the ability to look at herself from the outside, to lead herself.

I believed in the magical power of the game so much that I no longer knew how to hold it back. He composed game plots both impromptu and in advance, when he was driving from work in a trolleybus, and sometimes even at work.

The first to notice this was my colleague, a skeptic who predicted all kinds of family difficulties for me with the birth of a child. By the way, he almost always accurately guessed my condition, announcing, for example, to the entire department: "Comrades, please speak in an undertone, let Chibrov take a nap ..." This was after a sleepless night. Or: “Attention, something happened to Chibrov. His miracle child, it seems, has already begun to study sopromat ...” I had to report on the next successes of my child, the reflection of these successes, apparently, was on my face. This time he noted: "Not otherwise today Chibrov is trying to translate his pedagogical reflections into the language of mathematical formulas." I told him about the game plots. He perked up: "This is a simulation of problematic situations in everyday life. Just do not program one inevitable ending in the game, otherwise your child will not have a choice ... The main thing here is the choice of one or another variant of behavior.

At home, at that evening time, when Valya was finishing her daily chores or watching TV, freed from them by the impetuous, energetic Vera Ivanovna, Ksenka and I played. We crossed an imaginary street at a red light, due to which the toy truck ran into a pole (table leg), broke, and we repaired it. They flew on an imaginary plane to Africa, where they languished in the heat, then to Antarctica, where they froze together with penguins and treated one of them for pneumonia. Maxim Petrovich and Ksenya had their own games, mostly connected with a trip to the village. And here is today's story with the bear and Masha... How recklessly Ksyushka was sweeping the floor! And how bitterly she burst into tears when she learned that the bear did not want to let her go home.

It turns out that for her the game is not only a way of knowing life. Not only a tool - a kind of microscope, for example, helping her inexperienced child's eye to see in life what usually escapes the field of vision.

For her, play is life itself. Everything turned out to be merged in the game - both the labor of knowledge and the joy of discovery. Moreover, the result of the game-labor, the game-research was not important to her, she was interested in the process itself, the action itself, which in the game is always creativity. Her two-year-old consciousness is not yet able to separate fiction from reality - it lives completely in the "proposed circumstances", explores them, transforms or adapts to them. What she experiences in the game becomes a fact of life, the "building material" from which a person molds himself.

Yes, play is the most effective way for an adult to communicate with a growing person. A way of transferring knowledge, a spiritual heritage, subsequently developing in a child the ability to mentally "transfer" to another life, to understand another person, to feel the family as a collective of individuals. This is Ksenka ahead -: there is no doubt.

My mistake is that I perceived the game only as a way, as a means, that's why I was so careless. And it is for the child at the same time the goal. He is completely immersed in the game, without a trace.

This is us, adults, we think that the child is preparing for life.

And he lives at this time - actively and passionately! Lives in the current minute, and not in the expectation of promised events. For him, tomorrow is the distant future. He needs to feel alive, active - now. This is what we, concerned about the development of our child, forget: childhood is not a preparation for life, but life itself. Maybe even the main, decisive part of life. And it depends on how it is lived - will a person succeed?

SCHEDULE OF ACTIONS

FOR TOMORROW

Author's reflections on the vicissitudes

personality "programming"

In the parental imagination, there is almost always a model - what our child should become.

But how often do we think about how it should be grown? What are the means to achieve success in education?

Try to ask yourself and your friends: have you ever had to doubt and hesitate in choosing one or another method of influencing a child? The most probable answer: "What are you, never!" We catch ourselves when we discover: upbringing did not give the programmed