Snow Play, Imagination, and Empowerment for Kids
Did you ever do this as a kid? Stomp your way through the snow with your heels close together and your toes pointing out so the tracks you made with your boots looked like the track of a tractor?
My brother and I once walked painstakingly allllll the way up our driveway at an equal distance away from each other making our ‘tractor’ prints all the way to where the school bus picked us up. Our hopes? That we would fool Mom and Dad into thinking a tractor had come down the driveway.
Did we fool them? I dunno. I doubt it. I have a feeling my equidistant footsteps weren’t as perfect as my older brother’s. That and the fact that the tractor stopped right at the end of the front walk. And one track had size 9 shoes and the other about a size 1. Among several other tiny flaws. Like the fact that it took us a really, really long time to get to the end of the driveway and they probably saw us.
But the cackles we had at the thought of our parents being fooled into thinking a tractor had come by was fun.
Why Kids Should Pull Pranks on Adults
There is something special about being a kid and thinking you’ve pulled the wool over the eyes of an adult. It is empowering and takes a bit of a cognitive leap to create and pull off a good prank. Timing. Patience. And a bit of problem solving as well as imagining the foreseeable flaws in the ploy to fool others.
When you were a kid, what was your favourite or most memorable prank you pulled on an adult? Do your kids pull pranks on you?
