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Parenting Year of PLAY
Lets make a resolution for whole of 2011 - I will Play.
Having children means spending a lot of time on them. We feed them, get them ready for school, buy presents, take them to the dentist, supervise their homework, all of that and more.
They are blissfully unaware of how much time and effort we adults spend to make their little lives possible. But definitely all these things make us stand out in the eyes of our children as ‘adult’. Do they know that we are children too? Do we ourselves remember?
Your child would love to meet THAT CHILD in you and share a game with it. No, not playing cricket or going to Amoeba, but making something together, imagining something together, having fun together.
When is the last time you went down on your knees, crawled along with cars or stuffed animals, talked funny, got your fingers smeared with paint?
Most of us play FOR the child. Somehow we fell that the child needs a teacher, a guide, an adult to play with. We can’t be more wrong. We need to play WITH the child, just like another child. Yes, the child needs to learn from us, not by teaching, but by seeing us doing it. If we are going to say “See how I am doing, do it like that” – then the whole purpose of playing is lost – it becomes teaching.
Its when we enjoy the activity ourselves, and let the child choose from us whatever he or she wants to learn. That’s when learning and playing of highest order is happening. You are also building great bonding and rapport. It does not have to be long and you may well find it gives you energy for and a renewed sense of meaning to all the daily care taking.
Here as an example we give some guidelines on how to PLAY WITH your child?
Plan for this activity, organize your life so you will not be interrupted for about an hour or so, give it your undivided attention. Try to make sure you spend time alone with each of your children. To avoid rivalry, organize for the others to be out, and play with one.
Prepare the child so it does not suddenly have to interrupt other play (however, do not push the child). Instead of asking “Do you want to paint with me’, make a statement: ‘You know, what I really would like to do, I’d like to sit and paint with you.’ How often do we express in words that we delight in a child’s company anyway?
This is how you can start:
You get a big sheet of cheap paper - brown paper or newspaper quality, put out the colours, water, brushes, different crayons, rags, old newspaper etc. Make the whole process a joint endeavour: putting out all the things required, working on the painting and the cleaning up afterwards.
Set your limits: e.g. no paint on the floor or the walls, no throwing of paint on the floor. But within these limits make it possible to move freely by both of you (putting on old clothes etc).
This is not about ‘doing things right’ but about having a good time while doing something. Try to avoid praise or criticism of the result but stress the fun you are having, or the wonderment at what you discover while putting paints on paper, “Oh yellow and purple go well together; look what happens when I smear the paint with my fingers”. Wonderment frees creativity!
ONLY if the child wants, persevere development of a particular skill. Otherwise just change the task when the child is getting annoyed or frustrated because ne or she ‘cannot do something’.
If they cannot get started suggest a figure, draw something, or scribble and guess together what you see in the scribble and then proceed to bring out that shape. You can develop the painting by making stories as you go along: ‘Here comes the hippo and plunges into the pool, and now who does he want to play with him? Oh a starfish, will you paint a starfish, and I want to put some flowers by the pool.’ (Remember, hippo’s do not have to look like real hippos!)
Whenever the moment feels right introduce a new skill or way of painting, like dipping fingers in the paint and using them as ‘brush’, making the paint more watery and let the colours flow into each other on the paper. Press crumpled newspaper or aluminum foil into half dry paint and see what patterns you get, scratch in the paint with a toothpick, use paint over wax crayons etc. EXPERIMENT. ‘Trying out’ is a great way of learning, because there are no mistakes - ONLY DISCOVERIES.
When you will feel their attention span has come to an end, wind up by cleaning together as something perfectly natural and belonging to the process. Later you can put up the painting on the wall for a while, if the child likes to do so: ‘Look, Daddy and I did this one together’.
It is important that instead of the quality of work, we focus at the quality of time. Remove all other expectations from play time except questions like these for you to reflect upon: “Did I learn something new about my child, how does she think, what does she imagine, what does she like, what is she afraid of?” Etc.
And most importantly, “Did I have fun?”
So learn how to PLAY from our KIDS anhere is to 2011 as a year of PLAY! And lets
Aditi-Ratnesh
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