Pirate Eliot

For my other class, Childhood Development, I wrote about a young boy in our class. Here is the observation I made about him.

Working at the Children’s Center has been a great experience while being in this class. I get to see most of the subjects we have learned about appear in most of the children I work with. Lately we have been talking about social interactions and theory of mind. In observing the children and connecting the dots to the lessons we have had, I have been able to make some assumptions and label children’s behaviors.

In the class I work with there are now 9 boys, all around the age of 5. And they are full of energy… let me tell you. Most of the boys have behavioral and/or emotional problems. At first I would label most of them as either Rejected-aggressive or Controversial, but knowing about the way it is seen as a whole group decision changes things. But, even though certain children in the group would most likely be considered popular, in any other setting right now they would be in a very different situation. One child in particular I am thinking about, we’ll call him Eliot, is they type of boy who stokes the fire under another kid to get them to do naughty things. He never is the leader but the provoker. Eliot is a popular kid in the class; he makes the other kids laugh with his crazy ideas and his ability to manipulate kids. Eliot is very aggressive though, physically especially. So it’s interesting to me that in this situation he is seen as popular amongst this crowd of kids.

Another observation about this same boy Eliot is his ongoing pretend friend, or in this case, pretend pirate. While reading the supplementary readings about how children take on the pretend character as themselves I immediately thought of this boy! This pretend character originated about 2 months ago at the Children’s Center. We had a day where one of the TPS’s had designed a treasure map that the kids could all follow to find some buried treasure. We all dressed up and practice making pirate sounds. At this point this boy decided that his name was “Pirate Eliot”. And even after the game, all day long as a matter of fact he was not “real name” he was Pirate Eliot. As the weeks went on there would be times when he still insisted on being this character. As time went on the character became more elaborate as well, he had certain villains that always appeared, and monsters that always lingered around when Pirate Eliot was present. He would also at times when he was in trouble and we would be asking him things or addressing him with his real name he would tell us he didn’t do that because he wasn’t that person, he was Pirate Eliot. Often he would have a hard time when the TPS’s for certain reasons had to tell him that they wouldn’t call him Pirate Eliot for certain reasons that day.

In connecting the dots it’s easy to see that this boy has a rich imagination, and I believe it has given him a better theory of mind. I believe that because he does have a better theory of mind it has given him the ability to be popular amongst his friends, understanding more of what they are feeling and how he can sometimes manipulate them as well.