下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
CHAPTER 1
Play is the essence of life. 1
Think about the loving gaze of an infant, the no-holds-barred embrace of a toddler, the intimacy of a shared bedtime story, or a silent hand-in-hand walk. These moments of heartfelt connection with our children are part of the great payoff for the hard work of parenting. Yet this connection all too often eludes us. We find ourselves locked in battle instead of joined in partnership. We all know the rest: the inconsolable baby, the toddler in the throes of a tantrum, the third-grader in a huff over bedtimes, the twelve-year-old sulking in her room.
Children's natural exuberance and exploration often gives way to what I call “fighting and biting.” Or they hide themselves behind a Game-boy or a locked door. Meanwhile, our profound feeling of parental love is replaced by resentment and aggravation, even rage. We nag or punish, or we say, “Fine, stay in your room.” We yell when we reach the end of our rope, or just out of habit. All because we feel helpless, rejected, and cut off. We want to reconnect, as much as our children do, but we don't know how. We still love them, but we barely remember those melting eye gazes of babyhood. If we do remember, it is a bittersweet memory, as if that closeness were lost forever.
Play—together with Playful Parenting—can be the long-sought bridge back to that deep emotional bond between parent and child. Play, with all its exuberance and delighted togetherness, can ease the stress of parenting. Playful Parenting is a way to enter a child's world, on the child's terms, in order to foster closeness, confidence, and connection. When all is well in their world, play is an expansive vista where children are joyful, engaged, cooperative, and creative. Play is also the way that children make the world their own, exploring, making sense of all their new experiences, and recovering from life's upsets. But play is not always easy for adults, because we have forgotten so much. Indeed, children and adults often seem to reside in radically different worlds, even within the same household. We find each other's favorite activities boring or strange: How can she spend all afternoon dressing up Barbies? How can they sit around all evening just talking?
Parenting and playfulness can seem like contradictions, but sometimes we just need a little push to find one another and have fun together. I was at an outdoor concert, dancing off on the side with my nine-year-old daughter, when a mother and son came over to the dance area. She started dancing a little, but he just stood with his arms folded, a little too shy to dance now that he was there. He was about six or seven. His mother said, starting to get angry, “You dragged me up here, and now you're not going to dance?” He folded his arms tighter and literally dug his heels in. I thought, We can all see where this is going. I said, “Oh no, he's doing a new dance,” and I folded my arms just like his and gave him a big smile. He smiled back and moved his hands to a different position, which I copied. His mom caught on right away and started copying him, too. We all laughed. He started moving his shoulders up and down to the music, and his mother said, “You're dancing!” Then he started to dance, and he had a great time. We all did (including my daughter, who waited patiently while I did “the Playful Parenting thing,” and then wanted my complete attention again). A little playfulness turned the tide.
This small episode demonstrates that Playful Parenting can happen anywhere and anytime, not just during designated playtimes. Playful Parenting begins with play, but it includes much more—from comforting a crying baby to hanging out at the mall; from waging pillow fights to taking the training wheels off the bicycle; from negotiating rules to dealing with the emotional fallout of a playground injury; from getting ready for school to listening to a child's fears and dreams before bed. Sadly, these simple interactions can seem out of reach sometimes, or full of complications and hard feelings.
The fact is, we adults don't have much room in our lives for fun and games. Our days are filled with stress, obligations, and hard work. We may be stiff, tired, and easily bored when we try to get on the floor and play with children—especially when it means switching gears from a stressful day of work or household chores. We might be willing to do what they want—like the mom at the outdoor concert—but then we get annoyed when they don't play the way we expect or when they demand too much from us.
Others of us may be unable to put aside our competitiveness or our need to be in control. We get bored, cranky, and frustrated; we're sore losers; we worry about teaching how to throw the ball correctly when our child just wants to play catch. We complain about children's short attention spans, but how long can we sit and play marbles or Barbies or Monopoly or fantasy games before we get bored and distracted, or pulled away by the feeling that getting work done or cooking dinner is more important?
When my daughter was in preschool, she made up a great game that helped me be playful instead of shouting at her to hurry up and get ready. One morning she came downstairs, hid behind the doorway, and whispered to me, “Pretend that I'm still upstairs and that we're really gonna be late and you're really mad.” So I shouted upstairs, “We're late, and I am really mad !” and I started storming around and stamping my foot. Meanwhile, she was behind the door giggling, her hand over her mouth. I said, “You better get down here, or I'm leaving without you. I'm going to go by myself to Big Oak Preschool!” She started laughing out loud, so I pretended I couldn't hear her. While letting her sneak out ahead of me, I made a big show of leaving the house without her, supposedly not noticing she was there. She got in the car and I pretended I was talking to myself out loud, saying, “I am so mad. The teachers are going to say, ‘Where is Emma?' And I'm going to say, ‘She wasn't ready, so I just left without her.' ” She was giggling and giggling and trying not to let on that she was really there. She was making getting ready for preschool fun for me !
Pretending to be mad helped me not to be really mad, and playing instead of shouting helped her get ready faster!
S ome children are leaders and some are followers; some prefer fantasy dress up while others are drawn to ball games. But virtually every child has an instinct for play that buds immediately after birth and is in full bloom by the age of two or three. Play is possible anywhere and anytime, a parallel universe of fantasy and imagination that children enter at will. For adults, play means leisure, but for children, play is more like their job. Unlike many of us adults, they usually love their work and seldom want a day off. Play is also children's main way of communicating, of experimenting, and of learning.
A child who won't or can't play is instantly recognizable as being in significant emotional distress, like an adult who can't work or won't talk. Severely abused and neglected children often have to be taught how to play before they can benefit from play therapy. Why do we consider child labor such an abomination? Because it means children grow up without having a childhood, without play. It's even worse when their labor is exploited so that adults can have more leisure, as depicted in this nineteenth-century poem by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:
The Golf Links Lie So Near the Mill
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And watch the men at play.
Many experts describe play as a place—a place of magic and imagination, a place where a child can be fully one's self. As psychologist Virginia Axline wrote about children in preschool: “They can build themselves a mountain and climb safely to the top and cry out for all the world to hear, ‘I can build me a mountain, or I can flatten it out. In here, I am big!'” 2 I had a great reminder of the basic nature of play at my daughter's third birthday party. I had organized all kinds of games to play in the park across the street from our house, and, of course, being a psychologist, I explained all of these complicated games to the children, who stood around looking at me as if I were from outer space. I wasn't sure what to do. The children were too revved up to go back inside, but they weren't going for my games. My wife interrupted and said, “Okay, everybody, run to the other side of the park and back!” They all ran happily across the park, shrieking and laughing, then ran back and flopped on the ground, giggling and panting for breath. They looked at me, and one boy asked, “That was fun, can we do that again?” I got the point.
Nevertheless, I can't quite stop talking about the serious side of play. Play is fun, but it is also meaningful and complex. The more intelligent the animal, the more it plays. Unlike slugs or trees, every human learns new things about the world, and themselves, through discovery and practice. Some of this learning just happens automatically, by virtue of being alive, but much of it happens through play. Human childhood has gotten longer and longer, which means an increasing amount of time available for play. Play is important, not just because children do so much of it, but because there are layers and layers of meaning to even the most casual play.
Take an apparently simple game like catch—a child and a parent tossing a baseball back and forth. Much like observing pond water under a microscope, close observation of a game of catch reveals a great deal going on right under our noses. The child is developing hand-eye coordination and gross motor skills; the pair are enjoying their special time together; the child practices a new skill until it is mastered, and then joyfully shows it off; the rhythm of the ball flying back and forth is a bridge, reestablishing a deep connection between adult and child; and comments like “good try” and “nice catch” build confidence and trust.
But this straightforward game can also contain strong undercurrents of feeling. A father I was seeing in therapy described a game of catch during which his son threw him one zinger after another. He could see how angry and frustrated his son was by how hard he was throwing the ball. Together we figured out that perhaps his son was really asking him, “Can you catch what I throw at you? Are my feelings too much for you? Am I safe from my own impulses, my own anger?” Another father's son loved to play catch, but whenever he missed the ball, the boy would dissolve into tears and tantrums and say, “I told you to throw it lower—you never listen to me!” In this case, the child seemed to be using the game as a way to release a pile of hurt feelings that had nothing to do with baseball.
Not every game of catch, or every playtime with a child, contains all of these multiple levels of meaning. But all play is more profoundly meaningful than we usually think. First, play is a way to try on adult roles and skills, just as lion cubs do when they wrestle with one another. Human children roughhouse, and they play house. As children discover the world, and discover what they are able to do in the world, they develop confidence and mastery.
Play is also a way to be close and, even more important, a way to reconnect after closeness has been severed. Chimpanzees like to tickle one another's palms, especially after they have had a fight. Thus, the second purpose of play serves our incredible—almost bottomless—need for attachment and affection and closeness.
The third purpose of play for children, and perhaps the one that is most uniquely human, is to recover from emotional distress. Imagine children who have had a hard day at school. They come home and one way or another show you that they're hurting. They talk about it, or they are irritable and obnoxious. They lock themselves in their room, or they insist on extra attention. But most often, they spontaneously use play to feel better. Perhaps they play school, only this time they are the teacher. Maybe they play a video game and blow up alien enemies for a while. Or they call a friend and talk about it, which is what older children and adults often do instead of play. By pretending, or by retelling the story, the scene can be re-created. This time, the child is in charge. Through playing it out, emotional healing takes place. Escaping into a book or playing a hard game of tennis can also be helpful after a bad day.
One child I knew, who had lots of reading difficulties, would always come home from school and do something she was really good at, which was drawing. Before dinner she would show her parents what she had drawn. In one sweet moment, she was reconnecting with them, restoring her sense of competence, and recovering from the frustration and humiliation of feeling like a failure at school.
Before going into greater detail about these deep meanings of play, let me repeat that play is fun . Spending time with children is supposed to be joyful. My daughter's preschool teacher told me that preschoolers laugh an average of three hundred times a day. What would happen if we all did that? Let's have more fun: sing goofy songs, fall over, exaggerate, have pillow fights, tell jokes. If you are frustrated because you have to remind your child for the twelfth time to pack her lunch or take out the garbage, next time try singing the request in a fake-opera voice instead of using the usual nagging tones. At the very least it will get her attention.
As we shall see, however, Playful Parenting is more than just play. We can interact playfully, or on a deep emotional level, no matter what we are doing: working on chores, playing sports, completing homework, hanging out, watching television, cuddling, even imposing discipline.
F rom the time babies and parents begin to gaze lovingly at each other, they are starting to use play as a way to connect. Any game that people enjoy playing together can bring them closer, but some games are actually about connection. Games like peekaboo, hide-and-seek, and tag all play with the idea of closeness and distance. I consulted with a family whose son invented a great connection game. He would have his parents sit on the couch; then he'd run toward them, landing right between them. They would then fight over who could grab him first, and it usually turned into a giggly human tug-of-war. Play is one of the best things ever invented to build closeness. I think that must be why school-age children, when asked to define play, focus on the human connectedness of play: Play is what you do with your friends. 3
My daughter, when she was around five and loved fantasy play, would sometimes say to me, if I was getting frustrated with her: “Let's pretend you're the dad and I'm the daughter and you're mad at me.” Well, that won't be hard to pretend, I would think, but soon we would be laughing instead of arguing. I thought it was very clever of her to transform, through play, disconnection into connection. Then I read about the way chimpanzees use fantasy play, and I was even more impressed. 4
Chimpanzees, especially the adult males, fight each other a lot, but they are also experts at reconciliation. They love to make up. When two chimps are having trouble making up after a fight, sometimes one of them will pretend to find something interesting in the grass. He'll hoot and holler and all of the other chimps will come over to check out what he found. Since there's nothing really there, one by one they wander off. All except the other one who was in the fight. The two ex-rivals will continue to excitedly jump up and down over the imaginary something in the grass. Finally, they settle down and begin grooming each other, the sign among chimpanzees of friendship restored.
If chimpanzees and five-year-olds do it, then I think we can agree that using play to reconnect is a pretty basic idea. But sometimes children do not connect or reconnect so easily. They may feel so isolated that they retreat into a corner, or come out aggressively with both arms swinging. They may be annoying, obnoxious, or downright infuriating as they try desperately to signal us that they need more connection. These situations call for creating more playtime, not doling out punishment or leaving the lonely child all alone.
When children feel isolated, they can look withdrawn and depressed. Or they might look hyperactive instead, unable to pay attention, sit still, or calm down. Either way, the world is not their oyster, as it is for children who are able to reconnect.
A lonesome child says, “I'm bored.”
A twelve-year-old sobs, “Nobody likes me.”
A parent says, “I don't know what my three-year-old is thinking; she looks so sad sometimes, but won't tell me what's the matter.”
You try to get your daughter to call a friend, and she screams, “I can't call her; what if she's not home?”
An eight-year-old child is always on the edge of the playground, even after he knows the other children well. He says, “I just don't like to play soccer.”
The most common response by parents to children's isolation is aggravation or worry. We may focus on the annoying behavior, not seeing the pain underneath, or we see the pain all too clearly and feel helpless to fix it. These are difficult moments for any parent. What we need are keys to unlock the door to that fortress of isolation and help the child out again into the fields of play. Playful Parenting provides those keys.
While I was writing this chapter, a mother I'd worked with called to tell me how she'd used the principles of Playful Parenting to reconnect with her son. Her three-year-old, David, had been out of sorts ever since his mother and father had returned from a long-weekend vacation they had taken without him.
“David has been really clingy and whiny,” she said. “Every time I try to leave the house, or even the room, he grabs on to me for dear life. Yesterday I had my weekly tennis game with a friend. It's my only exercise, and my most precious personal time of the week. As soon as David saw me heading out the door with my tennis racquet, he grabbed hold of my leg and started crying for me not to go. I tried to explain that this was ‘Mommy's play date,' but he clung only tighter. I could tell this was going to escalate into a major power struggle, and I didn't have the heart to peel him off me and hand him over to his baby-sitter.
“Then I remembered what you and I had talked about. Instead of pulling away from David, I lifted him up and carried him to the couch. ‘Okay,' I told him happily, ‘I won't play tennis. I'll stay here with you and take a nap. I'm soooo tired. What a comfy pillow.' I yawned and lay down on top of him and pretended to snore loudly. He began laughing and putting his hand over my mouth to quiet me. I pretended to wake up and look around, saying, ‘Where's David? This sure is a lumpy pillow, and squiggly, too!' Then I pretended to go back to sleep, using him as a pillow and snoring some more.
“After a few minutes' more giggling, David pushed me off him and said, ‘Go, go—late for your play date.' We had a really sweet hug good-bye at the door, and he had a fine time without me. When I came home, he had drawn a picture of me playing tennis with an enormous racquet.”
W hat do you think of when you hear the phrase “playing doctor”? Most people's first association to this phrase involves children's secret sexual explorations: “You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.” That type of playing doctor illustrates the way children use play to explore their own bodies. Though playing doctor and other forms of sexual exploration are often difficult for adults to handle, it is really just a special case of “playing house.” After all, there are many rooms in the house, and most children have a great interest in what goes on in each of them. Through play, they practice cooking, cleaning, going to work, fighting, taking care of the baby—every adult activity they see around them. This kind of playful practice, performed over and over, makes them more confident.
Young children also play to learn about the world. Why aren't we amused when our toddler drops her food off the high chair for the hundredth time? Because we know about gravity (and we have to clean it up). She, however, is extremely amused, because everything about the universe is new and interesting and open to playful discovery. Including the funny faces and noises we make trying to get her to stop.
I mentioned before that older children define play as whatever you do with your friends. However, toddlers and preschoolers define play as doing whatever you choose. 5 This self-determination is part of the power aspect of play. My niece Bailey, when she was about six months old, had a rattle shaped like a bunch of grapes. She loved to make that thing shake. Her parents called her the boss of the grapes. When you can choose what to do, you are more likely to throw yourself into it.
My daughter and I had a period during her kindergarten year when she didn't want to get dressed by herself. She thought I was being mean because I didn't come dress her or keep her company the way I used to do in preschool. Meanwhile, I thought she was being difficult and uncooperative, since I knew she could do it herself. Instead of saying she was lonely, she would insist that she couldn't get dressed on her own. I was frustrated at this helpless attitude, this powerlessness. I was also frustrated because I had better things to do in the morning.
It took me way too long to figure out that nagging wasn't ever going to help. Finally, out of desperation more than cleverness, I picked up two of her dolls and I made one of them say (in a nasty voice), “Oh, she can't get dressed by herself; she doesn't know how to get dressed by herself.” Then I made the other one say (in a cheerfully encouraging voice), “She can so; she really can do it.” And then the first one would say, “Oh no, that's ridiculous; she's just five years old, she can't get dressed by herself.” The nasty doll would always somehow happen not to be watching as Emma dressed herself. This doll would say, “You see, she didn't get dressed by herself,” and the other one would yell back, “She did so! You weren't paying attention!” Meanwhile, she was not only getting dressed by herself, she was laughing instead of whining. I was laughing instead of fussing or tapping my foot impatiently for her to hurry.
After just a few times playing this game, getting dressed on her own became a habit, and I didn't have to spend every morning making up doll dialogue. Once in a while after that, instead of being pokey and driving me nuts, she would say, “Come in and be those people saying I can't get dressed.” Playfulness turned a time that used to be full of frustration for both of us into something fun, enjoyable, and confidence-building. Emma got over her loneliness and reluctance and got used to a new path. Of course, to get to that point, I had to put in some time up front. As every parent knows, that time may be hard to find, but it paid off in a very short while. If I take into account the time I used to spend nagging, fussing, and supervising, then I really come out ahead.
Children who are frustrated too much, or are unable to use play to master their world, retreat into what I call the tower of powerlessness. The meadows and fields are inviting, but confidence is required in order to play out there. Locked inside this tower, unable to play freely, they may appear weak and helpless. Or they may bounce off the tower walls, looking wild and reckless, even aggressive, but feeling powerless underneath. If children are too afraid of getting hurt, or expect to be rejected, or can't believe the world is theirs to explore, then they retreat: “I don't want to….” “I can't….” “I'm no good at that….” “Timmy's hitting me!”
Yet powerlessness sometimes expresses itself in confusing ways. As one worried mother put it, “You say my child feels powerless, so how come he's getting sent home from school for hitting? How come the teachers are afraid of him?” Powerlessness is a well-defended fortress, perfect for hiding out, but it is also good for preemptive strikes: “I hate you. Take that (with a kick or a shove or a bite)!” “You're stupid.” “I'm only playing if I get to be the captain.”
Just as Playful Parenting provides the key for helping children unlock the tower of isolation, engaging playfully with children also helps them build the confidence it takes to step out of the tower of powerlessness.
C hildren don't just play doctor as a cover to make their sexual explorations more respectable. Sometimes when children play doctor they are actually pretending that someone is sick or injured. This type of playing doctor is an example of the way children use play to recover from a traumatic incident, large or small. 6 A three-year-old gets a shot at the doctor's office. She comes home, and what game does she want to play? Doctor, of course. And who does she want to be? The doctor or nurse, the giver of the shot—definitely not the patient. And who does she want to give it to? Well, her first choice is a parent or another adult. If no one is available, she might use a stuffed animal or doll. And how does she want the game to go? She wants you to pretend to howl and say, “No, no, no, please don't give me a shot. I hate shots! No, no, no,” and act as if you are in an agony of pain and terror.
This response lets the child be in the more powerful position. It is a simple game of role reversal (the one who got the shot is now the one who gives the shot), but it is very satisfactory. Getting the shot made her feel powerless and reminded her of all the little frustrations that she's had, all the times when she hasn't been able to choose what to do or what to eat or what to wear—you know, the millions of things that children don't get to decide in their lives. It certainly wasn't her idea to go get a shot that day. Playing doctor this way lets her recover because she gets to see you as helpless and powerless and undignified, while she gets to be the powerful one.
The play shot might be pretend, but the need for emotional recovery is real. The child chooses this fantasy game because she wants a hand with her genuine feelings about the actual shot. This isn't just play for fun (though the child may have lots of fun with it); it is play with a purpose. The purpose is to go through the incident again, but this time letting the scary feelings out—usually through giggles. That's why a child likes to play this kind of game over and over and over.
We are all familiar with the comic-book sequence: the boss yells at the dad, the dad yells at the mom, the mom yells at the kid, the kid shoves the little brother, the little brother kicks the dog, the dog pees on the rug. (I call this emotional hot potato.) The way out of this cycle is for adults actively to help children recover. Unlike the child's younger sibling, we can tolerate the pretend needle without saying, “Why do you always get to be the doctor?” or without yelling, “Mom, Ronnie's poking me!” Unfortunately, being civilized adults, we are more likely to say, “Go away, I'm busy” or “Get away from me, I hate needles,” instead of playing this game with them. Sometimes, of course, the child does not need a playful approach; he just needs a lap to crawl into so he can cry about how much the shot hurt.
When children are discouraged or punished for attempting to recover emotionally in this playful way, they retreat into themselves. They may try to feel better in less playful ways, like finding a real needle and then jabbing baby brother or the cat with it. Or they may bury the feelings temporarily, at least until they have to go back to the doctor, where they then have a major screaming fit. When we see a child who is fearful, or violent, or out of control, we usually don't stop to put the pieces together. We don't think to ask ourselves if she had enough chance to play it through or talk it through. Usually we just see the problem behavior, which angers or worries us so much that we don't think about using play to help solve it.
A friend of mine, Lori, was at a playground, chatting with a woman she had just met and playing with the woman's two young children, a three-year-old girl and her little brother. Lori is very tolerant of wrestling and boisterous play, and soon the children were climbing all over her. Their mother thought the children should settle down. Before Lori could say anything, the mom whacked the older one, hard. My friend was torn—she's strongly against hitting children and wanted to tell the mother it was wrong—but she knew that the mother was in no shape to listen to her right then. Everyone was upset and angry. So Lori decided to keep an eye on the child who had been spanked. The little girl immediately picked up a stick and went after her little brother. Just in time, Lori grabbed her gently, pulled her aside, took the stick away, and said, in a playful voice, “Ohhhhh no you don't!” The girl laughed and laughed and wanted to play that game over and over. All thoughts of really whacking her brother were forgotten (for the time being, at least). The mother, who was able to see that my friend had defused a potentially dangerous situation, without yelling or hitting, watched them play with great interest.
It is not hard to imagine the punishment this young girl would have received if she had succeeded in clobbering the baby. The mother then may have felt totally justified in punishing her severely, forgetting that the aggression started with her own unnecessary spanking of her daughter. Instead, the whole situation was handled playfully. The girl's ineffective attempt to deal with being hit, by passing the hit on to someone smaller, was transformed into effective recovery, where no one got hurt. And my friend didn't even have to do much; she just stayed close to the child, made sure nobody got whacked, and used a relaxed and playful tone of voice. The little girl did the rest, deciding to play “try to hit the baby” instead of actually hitting him.
A shot at the doctor's office or a spanking from Mom or Dad are only two of the thousands of childhood injuries and insults that need emotional healing. None of us gets all of our needs perfectly met; none of us escapes childhood without insult or injury. And that's not all. Besides the big traumas and little upsets, children also need to process the new information they receive every day. Just think how many billions of bits of data that is for a child. So much is new to them, and it all has to be sifted through and sorted out. Play is their favorite way to do this. Luckily, play is one of the best ways available to heal from those hurts and to process that new information.
One father who called me for help said that his daughter had several classmates who were just beginning to learn English. This was fascinating to her, and for weeks, walking home from school, she would say, “Let's pretend we speak a different language.” She and her father would speak gibberish to each other, pretending it was the language of some other country. The father was a little worried that someone would hear them and think they were being insensitive, making fun of the children from Russia and Japan. I reassured him that, in fact, his daughter was practicing being empathic. She was dealing with something brand new in the only way she knew how: by playing.
Happy play can spontaneously heal minor upsets, but when children are stuck inside their emotional distress, they have trouble playing happily. Once again, they are locked in the towers of isolation and powerless-ness. It may be hard to tell which one your child is holed up in. Your daughter says, “I don't want to go to soccer, I stink at it,” and you wonder whether she is embarrassed because the other girls are better soccer players, or if she is having trouble making friends on the team. A first-grade bully hits someone every time the teacher's back is turned. Is he feeling isolated from his peers, not realizing that his behavior will only get him excluded more? Or is he testing his power, seeing what he can get away with, seeing how people will react?
Some children—those who are really hurting badly—spend most of their time feeling isolated and powerless, and little or no time playing freely. But even the healthiest, best-loved children will retreat into these two fortresses when they feel scared, overwhelmed, or abandoned. Think about when children are having a bad day. Do they seem unable to play happily, and instead resort to hiding or attacking or annoying you? Are they just going through the motions of life, without any real joy or spark? Maybe they're stuck, repeating the same words or games over and over without any fresh ideas and without having much fun. Perhaps their play is wilder than usual, or more reckless. These are signs of isolation and powerlessness.
If they are unable to recover by using play, children may be flooded with emotions (such as tantrums). They might lash out at others, storm around, or burst into tears at the slightest upset. Others may withdraw to their room, or shut all their feelings down (such as by staring blankly at the TV, compulsively flipping through channels). They seem lifeless and listless. Often adults overlook this second set of problems. Emotional shutdown, because it is quiet, can be confused with being “good.” But it doesn't feel good.
When children lock themselves away in one of the towers and pull up the drawbridge behind them, parents wonder how to help them. We may feel helpless and rejected ourselves. We may even go so far as to retreat into our own fortresses of powerlessness and isolation, which makes us even less effective in dealing with our children.
“He's a spoiled brat.”
“I don't know what to do with her.”
“I hate myself when I yell at them, but the next time I just yell again.”
“Suddenly she's afraid of the water, but I paid for a whole year of swimming lessons, so she's going to swim or else.”
“Go away, I'm busy.”
Play is one of the best ways to engage with children, pulling them out of emotional shutdown or misbehavior, to a place of connection and confidence.
W hen I talk to parents about playfulness, someone always says, “I don't really play much with my children; that's more my husband's job.” Another frequent comment is, “My children play great on their own. They don't need me to be involved.” I appreciate these responses, because they challenge me to explain why play is so important to children, why participating in play is so important for adults, and why being more playful is possible for any parent who is willing to give it a try.
I hope the next fourteen chapters provide clear guidance on how to break through the walls that divide children from adults, to discover ways to meet heart to heart. Playful Parenting helps with the toughest aspects of parenting: tantruming toddlers, biting preschoolers, anxious third-graders, out-of-control preteens. Playfulness resolves our battles over getting dressed and ready in the morning, soothes our frazzled nerves at the end of a long day, and restores family harmony. Playful Parenting offers a hand even when playfulness seems a dream that's out of reach or a joke in poor taste. When we are exhausted or when we are at the end of our rope, we tend to think that play will be just more of an energy drain. But when we engage playfully with our children, we find that suddenly we do have energy, both for fun and for finding creative solutions to thorny problems.
Many parents tell me, “I could never be as goofy as you.” I am not sure whether to take this as a compliment or an insult, but either way, it just takes practice. Contrary to what my daughter might tell you, I had to train myself to be as goofy as I am today. I had to get over my shyness and embarrassment about playing on the climbing structure with her when she asked me to, instead of sitting on the bench with the other parents. As long as we are grown up enough to handle things like keeping them safe and getting dinner on the table, our children want us and need us to loosen up. I don't think it makes sense to leave the playing for others, who are “better at it.” Why should they have all the fun?
And if we don't play, we miss out on more than fun. Play is where children show us the inner feelings and experiences that they can't or won't talk about. We need to hear what they have to say, and they need to share it. That's why we have to join children where they live, on their terms. Children don't say, “I had a hard day at school today; can I talk to you about it?” They say, “Will you play with me?” If we say yes, they play out what happened in the best way they know how. Or they don't say anything, needing us to take the initiative. By the end of the game, we may have helped them boost their confidence and their inner feeling of being loved—just what they need to go back to school and solve the problem themselves. If they don't think we will play, they may not even ask. They just go about their business, and we go about ours, and we all miss chance after chance to reconnect.
I spend a lot of my time at work reintroducing play and playfulness into families that are quite normal and average but that have lost a bit of that zestfulness and joy. For example, I was a few minutes late when I knocked on the door of my friend Connie's apartment to play with her and her son Brian. They had been having some minor troubles—nothing serious, just typical stuff between a nine-year-old boy and his mother: not wanting her to hug and kiss him; being sarcastic; talking back; living and breathing sports; dismissing his mother and everything else female. Brian and I had played together once before. That time, Connie and Brian came over and we swapped kids—I did the rough-and-tumble thing with Brian while she played Barbies with my daughter. This was lots of fun and a big relief for all of us: finally an adult who knows how to really play; finally a child who wants to play something I'm good at.
This time, as I knocked on the door, I wasn't sure what to expect. As Connie shouted, “Come in!” Brian yelled out, “You're late, you idiot!” We were off and running. I came in and said playfully, “What did you call me?” I chased him into the other room, where he collapsed onto the couch. I buried him in pillows. He leaped up and we started a pillow fight. Connie was sitting next to me, chuckling. She loved seeing his nastiness aimed at someone else for a change; he loved that he could get away with it without getting a lecture or a punishment or an end to playtime. I loved it because Brian was showing us what he was feeling inside. Not directly, but by calling me an idiot and whacking me with a pillow, he was revealing what I call the hard spots, places where he felt pounded or stupid himself.
I whacked Connie with a pillow to get her into the action. It was their relationship with each other that was important, not mine with Brian. “Oh, ho ho,” Connie said to me. “So you want me to play, too?” “Yes!” answered Brian, and we had a great three-way pillow fight. A couple of weeks later, I talked to Connie about what this playtime was like for her. She felt that it had greatly improved her relationship with her son, by helping her notice that he really did still want to play with her and be close to her, even though he often seemed to push her away. She also realized that she had been feeling drained from all her caretaking duties—cooking, driving, helping with homework, chauffering to sports—and she had little or no energy for play. Getting in some good playtime, though, not only helped her see how much her son wanted it and needed it, but also how revitalizing this kind of play can be. Since then they have played much more, and from Connie's reports, I am not sure who has enjoyed it more.