
How Hide and Seek affects a kid’s growth.
TL;DR: It helps develop their cognitive, and social abilities.
As I was playing hide-and-seek with my cousin’s eldest. I got to thinking, how will this interaction help him and other children in the future?
Hide and seek. One of the common childhood games we all share growing up. Known as a popular children’s game where players try to hide in an enclosed environment, to be found by one or more seekers. Ref. Encyclopedia Brittanica.
If you were a regular kid, who had regular people to play hide-and-seek with. Surely, you are familiar with the game.
However, if you are to recall how the game works. It usually goes like this.
- We pick the seeker who counts to “n”. (Oftentimes we torture them with counting until 100, poor souls)
- Other players run off to hide thinking they won’t be found. (Crazy kids, we’ll always be found)
- Once the countdown ends the seeker scrawnily goes out to try and find the other players. (Wipe that smug out of your face you funky kid you)
- If by chance the seeker finds a player they usually scream “Ha! Huli ka!” (roughly translated to: “Ha! Found you!)
- Then both seeker and player rush to the home base of the seeker to hit the pole to “capture” the person who was found.
And the cycle repeats for the other players.
If you followed through on reading the article, Here are things to take note of whenever we do play the game:
- We understood the laws of the game through social interaction
- We learned how to determine what places we perfectly fit on
- We learned exactly how it feels to get stuck. (At least I did)
- How to handle tension
- How success felt like
- How defeat felt like
- Outsmarting the seeker
- We learned how to either be a good, or a bad sport.
- How to be imaginative with hiding spots
Now that we have grown up, only seldom do we get to play hide-and-seek. But with age comes foresight. Let’s discuss how kids playing hide-and-seek affected us.
- Understanding the laws of the game
No contract, just the regular agreement between two, or more youngsters. Because the experience of playing the game is enough to make us trust the people we are playing with, and understand the game we were playing. - How to determine places we perfectly fit
Spatial Reasoning, a category of reasoning skills that refers to the capacity to think about objects in three dimensions and to draw conclusions about those objects from limited information. In other words. We learn early on if we can hide in places fit for hiding. Reasoning is developed through the thought of needing a place to hide, and it is developed well throughout the game. To think that we hid on places where we almost got our hands stuck is a scary thought, good thing we developed that early on. - Handling tension
If you can recall. There would be instances when the seeker was close to your hiding spot. Imagine the butt-clenching tension you would have had back then! Making you hold your breath, and having to deal with that rapidly beating heart, almost relatable to anxiety. Making you breathe harder than usual, or to certain extents, making you hold your breath for a good 10 seconds. It’s these repetitive experiences that help us shape our character as we grow up. That safely-enclosed tension well-put in a game helps us build character in the long term… - Our first hit of success
Usually, success is felt by the seeker during this phase. The feeling of finding a player’s butt protrude out from under the table, calling them out, and running towards the pole in a successful stride helps us early on to develop a certain understanding of how success would feel like. The other side of the spectrum would be failure. The failure of having found a perfect spot to hide, only to get called out early the seeker, and tyring to race the seeker back to the pole, only to lose the race. It is probably one of the disappointing moments of our hide-and-seek career. And we carry that out to the next which is… - How to work harder than the seeker to run towards the seeking pole
If you were the proactive kid, you would wait for the seeker to leave their spot and quickly run towards the seeker’s pole to save yourself from being found… These kids were among the top-performers back then. Brave and imaginative, they always tried to think one step ahead of the seeker. If they fail to do so, they will do their best, come hell-or-high-water to run as fast as they can to the seeker pole to save themselves from getting ousted from the game! Imagine the drive we had as children to finish faster than the seeker! - We learned how to either be a good sport, or a bad one.
That goes without saying, either we hold a tantrum, or we do not. Either we meet someone who has a tantrum, or we do not. Either way, we shape our perceptions of people with how we, or we see them react with the results of the game. - How to be imaginative
“I wonder, can I fit on that barrel over there?” “I think I might be able to shimmy myself into that corner over there and hide myself with some pieces of plywood”. “That pit looks good to squat around!”Simple things that help boost our creativity in (controlled) high-tension situations. On which we carry through adulthood.
If you look at the effects that hide-and-seek has on the young mind. I think it’s good to know that it helps them become well-balanced.
So go play hide-and-seek with that little tyke of yours! The benefits of it are beyond the regular laughs and giggles, but it also develops their cognitive abilities.
