Tapping Into Your Inner Child
A life dominated by screen-time and the need to be ‘liked’ has replaced meaningful relationship building, connection and most of all PLAY!
Play is an essential part of learning and development for children, and continues to ‘play’ a significant role with regards to adult creativity, happiness, and well-being. This was clearly expressed by one of our childhood favourites, Mr. Rogers: “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play really is the work of childhood.”
Think back to your own childhood and how much freedom you actually had to create, explore, and engage in fantasy play (i.e. creating forts with sheets and blankets, using large cardboard boxes to build a house or a car, playing with kitchen utensils and pots and pans, and putting on puppet shows, acting out scenes, telling stories, and expressing emotions). We didn’t have toys with bells and whistles, we had to create the bells and whistles with our own voice or in other creative ways.
Play is the “language” that children speak to explore, test, and understand their environments. Play promotes virtually all of the skills important for a child’s later success in school, such as, compassion, self-regulation, self-confidence, and the motivation to learn. And it is well documented that these skills are actually more predictive of later school success than is either IQ or early knowledge of letters and numbers. We have to wonder if that is why some of the most successful adults we know are also the most playful and fun (Nelsen et al., 2018).
Creating a playful learning environment:
Include items that produce a variety of sounds, have different textures, provide visual stimulation and even smell different.
Snacks and meals can provide rich opportunities to have young children experience varieties in how foods taste and feel.
Fill sensory bins with water, rice, grains, beans, or pebbles and invite children to fill different sorts of containers and dump them out (if you’re worried about a mess then find a place outside).
Most importantly play together with your children. Talk with your child as you play, laugh together, model good communication and appropriate behaviour as you build vocabulary, dexterity, creativity, social skills, and imagination.
Being a playful parent will engage your child and may also get your own creative juices flowing. Here are some tips to get you started (Nelsen et al., 2018):
Be less directive:
Allow your children to go at their own pace, be free to experiment, get bored, be messy, and to use their imaginations. This goes against our current practice of keeping them busy all the time by cramming their schedules with self- improvement activities.
Let them be kids:
Childhood is precious and short, and shouldn’t be all about training your child for adulthood. Make an effort to get into your child’s world!
Get your kids (and yourself) out into nature:
Let your children muck around in the park (not just in the playground), go for a walk with no particular destination, encourage them to play with mud, sand, and water. Collect things in nature, stop and smell the flowers, look at insects, bugs, and animals. Maybe create an art project with the items found in nature.
Don’t aim for perfection and have some fun:
Let yourself and your children get messy, dirty, and wet. Remember how much fun it was to jump in puddles as a child? Look scruffy on the weekend; let them choose their own clothes and dress themselves (even if it doesn’t match or is put on inside out) and how about asking them to choose your outfit?
Be present:
Don’t think of work, dinner, shopping or anything else when you are with your children. And most importantly, don’t use your cell phone. Be focused on what they are doing, feeling, and expressing and what you are doing, feeling and expressing. Think of the message we give our children when we put aside our cell phone and tune into what’s going on in their lives.
Without play we run the risk of raising children who feel stifled, coddled, and can’t trust themselves out in the world. So, as we raise the next generation of leaders we must ask ourselves, “do we want people who can discover, innovate, and create, or merely people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors (Kohn, 2015)?
Recommended readings for the early years:
Positive Discipline the First Three Years, Jane Nelsen, Cheryl Erwin, and Roslyn Ann Duffy
Positive Discipline for Preschoolers, Jane Nelsen, Cheryl Erwin, and Roslyn Ann Duffy
David Kohn. Let the Kids Learn Through Play. The New York Times (2015).