What Are Y’all Being? I’m Being This: What Kids Teach Us About Play and Identity
On a cold Tuesday in the preschool dramatic-play corner, a small group had gathered around the dress-up bin. Three children were negotiating something serious. One boy wore an orange plastic vest and a pair of sunglasses two sizes too big. A girl in a denim jacket stood with her hands on her hips and asked, “What are y’all being?” The boy looked at her for a second, then spread his arms wide and said, “I’m being this.”
That was the whole answer. Not “a firefighter” or “a superhero” or “a dog.” He was being this—the way he stood, the vest, the sunglasses, the feeling of being ready for something. The girl nodded and picked up a blue scarf. She wrapped it around her shoulders and said, “Okay, I’m being this too.” Then they ran off, and the play had begun.
I’ve heard that question a hundred times since then. It’s one of the most common ways children invite each other into play. But the answer is rarely what an adult would expect. Ask a four-year-old “What are you playing?” and you might get a shrug. Ask them “What are y’all being?” and watch what happens. They don’t describe a plot. They show you a state of being. They say “I’m being this” and then they run, or stomp, or flap their arms, or arrange their face into some half-serious expression.
That phrase, “I’m being this,” is more honest than we realize. For young children, identity isn’t a fixed label. It’s something you do in your body in a particular moment. When a child puts on a cape and says “I’m being this,” they’re not claiming to be Batman. They’re becoming something through action—something that might change in five minutes. The cape isn’t a costume. It’s equipment for a way of moving and relating to other people.
I thought about that last week when my daughter came home from kindergarten wearing a paper crown and a strip of red fabric tied around her arm. I asked her the standard parent question: “So what were you at school today? A queen?” She looked at me with genuine confusion. “No, Mom, I was being the person who guards the gate.” Then she crouched down and made a serious face. “When someone comes close, I do this.” She showed me. That was the entire explanation.
I had expected a neat answer. She gave me exactly what she experienced: a role defined by behavior, not by a title. The crown was incidental. The guarding was the being.
Children don’t separate “who they are” from “what they’re doing” the way adults do. We tend to file experiences into categories: a job, a role, a relationship. Kids just live in the middle of it. When they say “I’m being this,” they are telling us that play is not a performance of something fixed. It’s a continuous act of creating themselves from moment to moment.
That’s why the question “What are y’all being?” works so well. Instead of asking for a noun, it asks for a process. It’s present tense, and it’s plural. It includes everyone in the play space. It’s not “What are you pretending to be?” That would imply there’s a real you standing behind the pretend. “What are y’all being?” suggests that whatever you’re doing right now just is. The answer can be a sound, a motion, a whole physical stance. No explanation needed.
For parents and teachers, there is something practical in this.
When you approach a group of children at play, resist the urge to ask “What are you playing?” or “Who are you?” Those questions can force a child out of the experience and into an explanation. They have to stop, shift into language, and produce a label for you. Sometimes they can’t. Not because the play isn’t meaningful, but because it’s not a story they’re telling—it’s a world they’re inhabiting.
Instead, try the child’s question: “What are y’all being?” Or even better, “Can I be something too?” That’s an invitation, not an interruption. You’re not asking them to sum up their world for you. You’re asking to enter it on their terms. If you’re lucky, someone will hand you a scarf and say, “You can be this.” Then you do your best to be this without asking a bunch of questions.
Another useful approach is to observe before speaking. Children often need a few minutes to establish their roles before an adult shows up. If you jump in too early with questions, they have to explain instead of play. Wait until the play has found its feet. Then your question can become part of the play rather than a pause button.
There’s also something important about not correcting the answer. If your child says “I’m being this” and you can’t tell what this is, don’t press them for a clearer label. Accept the demonstration. Let them show you with their body. If they want you to understand, they’ll tell you more. Pushing for a specific character name can shrink a rich, open-ended experience into a fixed one. It also teaches kids that their play needs to be legible to adults to count as real. It doesn’t.
One afternoon in my classroom, a boy spent a long time arranging a row of chairs across the rug. When a friend asked what he was doing, he said, “I’m making the thing that holds the water back.” The friend looked at the chairs and said, “Oh, the dam.” The boy shook his head. “No. It’s the thing that holds the water back. I’m being the water.” Then he lay down on the floor and pushed his legs against the chairs, grunting with effort. His play made perfect sense to the other children. They immediately joined him as more water, pressing against the chairs, testing whether the barrier would hold.
No one called it a dam. No one needed to. The physical experience of pushing against something was the content of the play. If an adult had walked in and said “That’s a nice dam you’re building,” it might have ruined the whole thing. The boy wasn’t building anything. He was being water.
This kind of play is how children work out their place in the world. They experiment with power, cooperation, identity, and emotion. When a child says “I’m being this,” they are making an assertion about themselves in that exact moment. They’re saying: I am the one who does this. I am the one who feels this weight. I am the one who holds the line. That’s not trivial. That’s the foundation of selfhood, built out of small moments of embodied make-believe.
The grown-up version of “What are y’all being?” is our constant struggle to figure out who we are. But we’ve lost the ease of it. We ask ourselves with heavy words: What is my purpose? What am I building toward? Meanwhile, a five-year-old just stands in a pair of oversized sunglasses and knows exactly what they are in that instant.
There’s an honesty in that I don’t want to lose. Sometimes I ask my daughter “What are y’all being?” when she’s playing with her friends, just to hear how strange and true their answers are. Last time, one of them looked at me gravely and said, “I’m being the part that doesn’t know yet.” Then she walked away.
I still don’t know what that means. But I know it’s real.
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