Paper short abstract:

Often, children’s traditional games reveal profound reflections and mental concerns. Such manifestations are perfectly coherent with the state of mind of Little Prince. This innocent and genuine wisdom of children is the basic premise of their future engagement when they become adults.

Paper long abstract:

Beyond their function as simple amusing moments in spending time, children’s traditional games (and daily conversations as well) point out profound reflections and mental concerns of the little participants. Either they imitate adults’ work activities or let themselves absorbed by the games as such, children are clearly oriented in their behaviour according to the highest human values like those involved in the tension between death and life, individual and social, good and bad, etc. Concrete examples from the Romanian traditional culture are brought for sustaining this idea ‒ among them: a game in which a “dead” child is “resurrected” by sprinkling him/her with “living water”, and another one in which “the becoming of the world as a fight between God and Devil for winning the human souls” (Geană 2020) is imagined. These manifestations are perfectly coherent with the state of mind expressed by Little Prince in several of his apophthegmatic sentences as: “If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom”, or: “Happiness doesn’t lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes”, and in many others of the kind. The main idea of the present paper is that this innocent and genuine wisdom of children is the basic premise of their future engagement in society when they become adults.