How I make sense of children´s expertise on their own lives.

Bruna (Substack) · Personal essay · May 2025 · Portuguese
"É porque foi assim que a minha casa queimou"

It was July 2017. Newly committed to the task of becoming an educator, I travelled 450 kilometres along the Spanish coast to witness the work that was designed at a rural Montessori school inland from Cartagena, Murcia.

I believe that there was where I anchored, in myself, an ethical and political commitment to preserving beauty and spatial intentionality in the environments we build for childhood. It was there, too, that I understood the importance of materiality as a deep, expressive resource of children's language.

Next to so much beauty - in the curation, selection and arrangement of the materials available, from books and games to natural elements, building tools, paints , inks and more colours - there was also a world carried with pain, loss, trauma, violence and abuse.

An entire universe can present itself in childhood; including the darkest ones.

2017 was also carrying the consequences of the Syrian war, which since it began in 2011 had, by then, taken more than 500,000 lives. As if that weren't enough, the living carried their own annihilations too, in the shrapnel left behind by destruction.

As if that weren't enough either, there were still children left to tell that story.

One I try, with all my reverence and respect, to translate here.

That training ran over ten days, and during that time I was able to closely observe some of the children playing there. It was summer holiday season, but the school made sure its children still had access to places that respected their childhood, places that recognised their size and their place in the world, especially against a global reality that, so often, denies them exactly that.

On this occasion, three children were playing on the lawn, which offered them countless loose parts. That's the name given to what I consider childhood's real treasure chest: materials the toy industry hasn't yet claimed as its own. Tyres, pipes, boxes, pots, scraps of wood, and fabric loose in the wind. Simple materials — unfinished, unassuming.

Materials that become a precious invitation for children to tell their own stories. Materials with no pretension of anticipating the mystery and complexity that emerges in a child's discourse when they play.

And it was there, on that open lawn, that I witnessed a story told by one child about how her house, her history, and part of her family had been reduced to dust amid the Syrian war.

She was playing with two other children: a Spanish child, and another who shared with her memories of a life lived in war. Memories that were the result of the sick relations of an adult world — adults who had lost the children they themselves once were.

Together, they stacked tyres, and once the stack was large enough to become a house, one of the girls climbed inside while the other went looking for pieces of wood to mark out the space.

The scene set, the girl inside the tyres, crouched down, said to her friend:

"There — now you set it on fire!"

At this point, the third child, whose eyes and heart had not yet been marked by the horror of war, asked what they were doing.

"I'm setting fire to the house."

(To adults no longer fluent in the world of play, there was no "real" fire in that scene. We call this symbolic play, or make-believe.)

"Why?" the third child asked.

"It's because that's how my house burned."

This scene, photographed forever inside me, could be read through countless lenses. For now, I want to offer it simply as a reflection — an invitation to think of play as a matter of categorical seriousness in childhood.

In play, there can be war, fire, possible and impossible mothers, superheroes, flights and falls. A whole fortress can be built, only to be knocked down a moment later with one gleeful stomp. Play holds room for every improbability, and for every possibility a child longs for. It is in symbolic play — in the representations children impress onto every element they draw on in that moment, whether their own body, their surroundings, the materials at hand, or another person's willingness to join in — that they safely and securely make meaning, narrate, work things through, dream, desire, and produce their own discourse about themselves.

The tangled skein of the world fills, little by little, with sense and meaning for them, as they play. Play is a force so sovereign that it survives the rubble of war. It is childhood's vital force — one of the driving springs that lets a child come into being in this world.

I'll close by asking permission from one of my great teachers, Maria Amélia Pereira, who always helped me untangle the knots in my kite when, alone, I couldn't:

"I came across a group of children, one of them holding a kite, the others behind him chanting: 'Christen it, christen it, christen it!' I stopped and said, 'What is it you're christening?' And the boy said: 'That kite — because he used the whole spool of string. The kite is christened now, and no one can ever cut it down.' And that's when I made the connection: to me, play is using the whole thread of each being. When you're using your whole thread of life, you're playing. And that is profoundly serious."

Because, in the end, that's what play was: using the whole thread of life. Even in the driest of settings, even amid the rubble. Play persisted — a thread of existence no war could cut.