If you hit the beach this summer, you are likely to agree with the folklorist Jay Mechling, who proclaimed sand to be “the perfect plaything for humans.” He had good reason to think so.
For starters, sand feels good and inviting on bare feet. Especially so when it is warmed by the sun. Warm sand yields underfoot; strained through toes, it gives way to footprints that track the beginning of play. Molded and sloped and topped with a beach towel, sand makes for an improvised recliner. Playful engineering invites and enables relaxation and contemplation. There is a purpose to re-creation. Sand will drift, and at the beach, so will your mind.
Dry sand begs to be scooped, lifted, sifted, and streamed out idly through an almost closed fist. Dry sand, made up of minute solids, tiny broken bits of shell and stone, once loosed, behaves almost as a liquid. Sand flows beguilingly through toy plastic funnels. At the beach, gravity powers the dry fluid instructively through toy paddles and wheels.
Sand can be shoveled and ruffled and raked through without consequence. Sand is clean. Sand brushes off. Sand is not mud.
Parents may sink pennies into the sand, making up a story about a buried pirate hoard and launching a treasure hunt. Fancy metal detectors may hunt for stray earrings or lost items or fantasy doubloons if the searcher is in a storytelling mood. Because sand shapes can be so easily made, unmade, and remade, the medium encourages playful invention.
But wet sand yields even more easily to imaginative or impish play. A toe may trace a line in the wet sand, daring a companion to cross. With waves lapping, a stick may leave a temporary text—two names with a heart in the middle, “Beware sharks!” inscribed playfully on a Great Lakes beach, or for a modern postcard photo-op, “Wish you were here!”
Very wet sand can be dribbled. A sandcastle, its stout sand foundations laid with overturned buckets, and its walls scored with crenellations, will be decorated with dribbled parapets. Shells, if handy, will suffice for portcullises. Moats will protect the curtain walls. In saltwater environs, captured sand crabs may be recruited as temporary knights. But mutinously, they will quickly burrow away from their little human commanders.
Listen to kids as they construct with sand, their “sandwork,” as the folklorist calls it. They narrate. They tell stories. They will recruit the mythologies they know so well. Taking Transformers as inspiration, perhaps. Or the characters from the Pokémon universe that they know in such detail will fill out the unfolding folklore.
I listened in recently to kids playing at building a sandcastle, but couldn’t keep up with the dizzying side yarn that a five-year-old and a seven-year-old together wove from an elaborately rule-bound pantheon of heroes. I heard something about Corpish and more about Kingler, who seemed to be something like crabs. They were stalwart guards at any rate, protecting the castle against—well, here I lost the thread.
Free association like this is never truly free, because it draws not just from the elaborate established lore—the origin stories and the deep well of the characters’ titanic, unceasing conflicts—but children also weave their feelings into their storytelling. Their stories trend.
It is a phenomenon, the children’s rolling, revealing creativity, that almost a century ago attracted the attention of psychotherapists and embroiled them in a fierce debate. To sum up. On the one side, Melanie Klein believed that young children’s play was equivalent to free association and opened therapy to children who could not otherwise describe their emotions. Impulses of anger and envy could thereby be analyzed and allayed. Anna Freud (Sigmund’s daughter) disagreed, believing that young children remained inaccessible because they lacked the mature adult ego that would open the subconscious to analysis.
A succeeding generation, Jungians this time, leapfrogged the impasse and made “sandplay therapy” a standard instrument in the diagnosis and treatment of children’s trauma. In the clinical setting, free, undirected play in sand fosters free expression and useful, symbolic storytelling. Toys in sand trays stand in for archetypes—heroes, sages, rulers, magicians, monsters, masked shadowy villains, and the rest. These, not coincidentally, map closely onto the Pokémon characters that populate and fuel children’s storytelling at the beach.
American Psychology and Sand Play
It happens that sand play also featured in the history of American psychology. One of its founding generation, G. Stanley Hall, the first to receive a doctorate in psychology in the United States and founder of the venerable American Journal of Psychology, wrote a slim volume, The Story of the Sand Pile, that speaks to us with such sustained good sense that the text deserves a contemporary read. (Hall also purveyed a steady stream of conventional late Victorian claptrap—racial eugenics, for example—but stick with me for his thoughts about sand play.)
In a summer retreat 30 miles outside Boston, a clever neighbor, meaning to occupy footloose neighborhood kids, arranged to have loads of “fine clean sand” delivered to his yard.
Sim City Before SimCity
Over the course of weeks and succeeding summers, these children built their own Lilliputian 3-D (and thus superior) version of SimCity. They transformed featureless piles with scraps of wood and twigs to make houses and barns, and they laid out a dozen mini-farms.
In their intense, “bright focus of attention,” voluntary play elaborated and codified. The players organized and cooperated to solve problems, imagining systems of transportation, agriculture, governance, and a market economy. They stacked firewood and baled fodder. They built bridges. They promulgated laws overseeing public safety. (A firecracker had blown up a house…) They invented a currency. They diversified occupations. They improvised toy carts and improved designs.
Free Play Is Learning
Hall, tendentiously, saw in this play a recapitulation of the growth of civilization. But the less extravagant and more lasting lesson that he extracted from the summers with the sand pile holds today. Free, imaginative, non-adult-directed play is learning. Sand-pile players aged out at about 14. But in the interval before that, creativity and spontaneity reigned. “On the whole, the sand-pile has, in the opinion of the parents, as much educational value to the boys as eight months of school,” Hall wrote.
Play with the perfect plaything for humans paid an additional dividend, according to Hall: “the boys have become more companionable and rational.” Then as now in the sand. Play trends toward understanding.