Here the child is the expert and the adult has been dismantled of her authority. I think it mattered a great deal that I was genuinely interested in everything. Parents and day-care staff were also interviewed in order to establish why some games do not work out, or are broken off or ended before they have really begun. Kalliala was able to find different themes in the games the children played. Roughly speaking, girls played home and relationship games while boys played battle and action games.
Girls are interested in the relationships between people, men and women as well as mother and child.
When they play, they tell a story about themselves to themselves. Their expertise is best seen when they use authentic material of their own. In play they reveal how their families eat breakfast and how the children are raised. Boys, on the other hand, used a different way of speaking in their games. The spoken lines were kept strictly to business and emotional speech was totally absent.