Don’t Tell the Parents! The Illicitness of Intergenerational Play

This chapter explores the way children’s literature and popular culture sometimes represents play-based relationships between the old and the young as something to be hidden from others. Using an approach to literary criticism based on Personal Construct Psychology, the author investigates the ways that depictions of relationships formed through play can lead to close bonds and shared secrets to be kept from parents, friends and teachers. Drawing upon the author’s doctoral study, the chapter includes close analyses of David Walliams’ Gangsta Granny and Richard Curtis and Rebecca Cobb’s Snow Day in order to delve into the way play is used as a literary device to develop a connection between the generations, sometimes to the exclusion of the middle (parent) group. Sociocultural questions of appropriateness and the sometimes unintentionally sinister implications of the relationships depicted are discussed, alongside the way constructions of childhood and old-age, which often lack authority within the wider narrative, are validated through shared recreation.