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Best known for his parenting books The Hurried Child, All Grown Up and No Place to Go, Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk, and The Power of Play, David Elkind is currently professor emeritus of the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Elkind's bibliography now numbers over five hundred items and includes research, theoretical articles, book chapters, and twenty-two books. He is a member of many professional organizations and is a past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). In addition to having been a consultant to state education departments and government agencies, Elkind lectured extensively across the United States, Canada and abroad. Key words-child development; childhood play; Jean Piaget; The Hurried Child
American Journal of Play: Much of your research and clinical work has centered on child development. Tell us about your own childhood and the ways in which you played.
David Elkind: I was born in Detroit in 1931, the youngest of six children, in the midst of the Great Depression. My parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood. Typical for the era, my mother was a homemaker. My father worked as a machinist in a machine shop. It wasn't an easy time, but because he was the foreman at the shop, his boss kept him working during the depression years, and so we had it better than many other families.
Like most children of the time, my friends and T made our own toys and games. One toy was a pistol or rifle made out of wood sawed to shape. We tied a clothespin to one end (the butt) of the gun and stretched a rubber band, made out of cut up car inner tubes, to the other end (the barrel). You pulled the trigger by opening the clothespin. As you can imagine, if you got hit with one of these, it really hurt! The other kids played pickup baseball, football, and basketball in a nearby empty field. They used whatever equipment they had. I have a lazy eye, and I wore a patch or glasses, so I was never good at ball sports.
In the winter, we built snow forts and had snowball fights. In summer...