Functional Fixedness

     You may only know that term if you took a child psych class in college and actually studied for the final.  I think of it though everytime I see Liam or Joshua turn our couch cushions into an obstacle course. See, objects are not always exactly how they appear to us boring in-the-box-thinking adults.  There once was a time when forks could be hairbrushes (I give Ariel the credit for that one) and when pots and pans were our favorite drums.
     Now how boring am I?  While Liam and Joshua turn toilet paper rolls into telescopes, I'm planning on putting their Easter baskets into the sandbox to use as... buckets!  Wow, that's a big jump.  I don't think I'm entirely bound by functional fixedness.  For example, I turned my nursing cape into a Superman Cape for Liam's Superhero birthday! But I'm not nearly as creative (anymore) as my boys.  They specialize in misuse of objects.  Take those magnetic fishing poles (used for puzzles and such). They're no fun at all if you're not holding onto the stick and swinging the string attached to a magnet around in a circle precariously close to your baby brother.
     Liam and Joshua can turn just about anything into a toy.  They spent hours running amok in the house with my scarf.  They both hold onto it and run in tandem back and forth up and down our hallway.  This was fun enough, but then I showed Liam that you can actually get inside of the scarf (hard to explain, it's actually like a tube scarf, if that makes any sense at all).  He had fun pretending to be a bear but then realized he could stuff the scarf with other valuables... like pillows.  Now my scarf will never be the same; and there are black fluffies all over the carpet upstairs as evidence.  Yesterday I was mildly amused when Joshua showed me his new "hat".  It was the top of my perfume bottle.  I smiled sweetly at him and told him to put it away. Five minutes later I happened upon Liam in the bathroom... spraying my perfume into a plastic cup and mixing it with bubbles.  It seems my perfume makes an excellent science experiment.  Speaking of science experiments, you know what else is fun to test out?  How high cotton can fly when you put it up against a fan.  And where better to get cotton than Mommy's couch pillows?
     So what is functional fixedness?  It's the lack of an ability to see things not just for what they are, but for what they can be.  It's in-the-box thinking that binds you to reality.  Functional fixedness is something that children simply have never heard of.  And if all was right with the world, perhaps they would never develop this debilitating condition.  Not having functional fixedness is what makes children so innocent.  It's the reason why sometimes the box can be just as fun as the toy and other times why they get into so much trouble.