Reasons not to Rush Your Inner Kid at Birchwood Isle

Every age player I know has been there at some point or another. You're new in a group, and everything seems to be happening around you. Being new makes you nervous, and you're worried that if you aren't careful, you're going to be overlooked by the people who are "in charge" in the group. You have to do something to get noticed. Eager to get it right, you weight your options, and you probably decided that you have two or three possible options for dealing with the terror of going unnoticed.

1. You could make a thread in which your character acts like a brat, forcing an adult to pay attention because somebody needs to punish him.
2. You could have a "crisis" in which your character becomes injured or is triggered by some activity that requires adult attention.
3. You could wait it out and hope that somebody notices you, but since previous experience tells you nobody will, you revert to option 1 or option 2.

Most groups are short-lived, lasting a matter of weeks before vanishing into the ether. Those that last rely on quickly-formed bonds between characters who then post almost exclusively with one another, leaving new members out of the loop and without anyone to create threads with.

In short, new members often have to take what they can get, when they can get it, and they often resort to using extreme behaviors to solicit a response from an adult. After all, you never know how much time and how many chances you're going to get to accomplish your main goal with a character (and specifically an inner kid). If you're only going to have one thread in which to express your character's feelings about his or her past, you have to do it quickly.

It's very typical in groups for existing players to exclude new players in favor of their preferred "clique.' If you're new, or if you're not part of the "in" crowd, your threads get dropped, your inner kid gets ignored, and nobody joins the open threads that you post. 

I'm the owner of Birchwood Isle, the one who pays the bills and who curates the site, and I cannot count on one hand the number of times that I have rushed into misbehavior for attention, or that I've pushed a "big reveal" in order to get adults to focus on my inner kids. It's happened to me, and not just in groups with frequent neglect, but in my own groups, when I'm not sure how long it's going to be before I have to move on to being the parent again (which can, admittedly, be stressful).

But here's what I've learned (the hard way), and the reason that I rush less often than I did before.

It's better when you take it slow.

I've talked about this before, and I will continue to hammer this home until every last person on Birchwood Isle understands it. 

We're not going to shut down next week; We've had a forum for Birchwood Isle (though it's moved a couple of times) for three and a half years. Ava and I are both very active and we both play plenty of kids, teens, and adults. We make a point of being available to you if you request a thread from either of us, and we commit to playing our character true to him or herself. In spite of our massive numbers of characters, each one is unique to the others and you'll get a different experience with each one of them.

Most of all, we're reading, and we're listening, and we're remembering. If you state, in one post, that your inner kid hates green beans, trust me when I tell you that we've either remembered that he hates green beans or we know that we should cross-reference dinner threads to establish which food it is that he hates. If you've said in one post that your character was locked in a closet every time she cries, we'll remember it and be able to apply this memory to the interactions with that child.

There's no need to rush information. That's why there isn't any application. Give it to us slow and steady, feed us a diet of your character and make that diet a rich one, full of little secrets revealed slowly, and not only will you get better results, we will crave threads with your character.

But what about spanking? What about those of you who are spankos who want nothing more than a good, swift kick in the pants? How do you go about getting that without "rushing things?" 

How often have you acted out in an arrival thread, knowing that it might be the only chance you're going to get to be spanked because after that, the adults aren't paying attention any more? Trust me, we get what it's like to want the catharsis so bad and worry about not getting the next one!

We're not like that. Give us a chance and we'll show you. Our adults notice things like (ADULT PLEASE) after the title of a thread. We're scanning threads to see where adults are needed and entering them appropriately. We're fully prepared to give you detailed spankings that you'll crave for the rest of your role playing life, if you let us. 

But if you push, we're not going to want to follow through. Take your time and enjoy the ride. We'll still be here next week as long as you're here next week.

We only ban predatory individuals who make it clear that they are interested in non-consensual situations or that they are interested in minor children (in real life).