“I just want to play with my dolls and my mom keeps interrupting me!” six-year-old Rachael explained to me one day. A child’s agenda is play, an adult’s agenda is work. Those two things are often diametrically opposed, resulting in you guessed it…conflict. What are our choices when our kids want to do something and we want them to do something else? We can use carrots and sticks to bribe or threaten them into it. Been there, done that. It doesn’t usually make me feel all that good inside. We can just walk away and leave them to it…also doesn’t feel that great inside because my infinite mommy brain will worry that professional doll player might not be the most lucrative career. Or ?? Or, what? What other options are there?
What’s meaningful to us, as adults, is very likely not all that meaningful to our kids. Sometimes we get a cooperative kid that does what we would like them to do, but equally as often, or maybe even more so, we get a kid that just flat out refuses. I learned pretty early on that you really can’t MAKE anyone do what they simply won’t do. For me, it usually resulted in frustration, fueled by fear, and me playing the power card of the adult and using that power to force the situation. Anger, tears, yelling, the silent treatment or withdraw are all common players. No one wants that and yet it’s so easy for many of us to fall right into it.
I’ve always thought that school should have a lot less work and a lot more fun. There’s a few kids out there that might agree with me. What if learning could feel like play, but really teach us a lot. That’s how I always taught, turning my classroom into a time machine and traveling back in time to take on the roles of historical characters, dressing in period clothing, speaking the roles, living as if we were really in that time and integrating all the subject areas into a big tapestry of play. We suspended disbelief and used experience as our foundation for everything.
What if we could live that person’s life, or this other one, or maybe even that one over there? What would it be like to live as someone completely different, some other time, some other culture, some other job, some other challenge? Now, that was fun.
One day, when my daughter was six she asked me what I was reading. I told her I was reading a book about play. She looked at me confused and said, “Why? You already know everything you need to know about play from when you were a kid.” We may have known everything we needed to know about play when we were kids, but for many of us, a lot of it has been forgotten on the way to adulthood.
When in play, we’re able to try things out, usually without the risk of death or major injury. We get to practice a range of emotional intelligence as we empathize with playmates, communicate clearly, negotiate, argue, build trust and come up with innovative solutions. We learn about the world, try new things, practice flexibility of thinking and we adapt to a changing landscape using immediate feedback as it all unfolds in real time. We never really know what’s going to happen next in play, and the flow boosters of novelty, unpredictability and complexity are all abundantly present. What we try out in the creative play space, can then be brought successfully into the real world. Contrary to what many believe, play is learning’s partner and no matter the age of the child, it’s something we can block out time to benefit from and enjoy.
A discussion of play would not be complete without a brief discussion of video games. Many homeschooling parents are concerned about their children’s use of online gaming. There are those parents that choose to put strong restrictions around video games or not allow screen time at all and there are those that are abundantly open to screen time. I don’t have an opinion on the good or bad of screens as I think it’s a very personal decision, but one thing to think about is that one way or another kids need to meet the basic psychological needs of choice, connection and competence.
Some kids meet those needs through playing online video games because that’s what’s available to them. They enter into a whole different world where they are free and no one is telling them what to do. They have few restrictions in the online worlds and cause and effect is clear. When kids play video games they often play with other kids, satisfying that social need for connection and kids can incrementally master a video game leading to feelings of mastery and competence.
When I was a kid, we all played outside with the neighborhood kids until it got dark and we all had to go home for dinner. That doesn’t much happen anymore, yet our kids still have those basic needs to meet. Developing communication skills, and social skills in general, usually happens amongst peers. That’s what we did playing outside in the neighborhood. If you don’t get along, you don’t get to play. Games were created, rules were established and through a sometimes democratic system of votes and negotiations, we all made it work. Skills like these learned from peers, are often more highly valued than being told how to behave by parents, teachers or other adults.
Whether playing online or in real life, kids need time to be able to develop these soft skills and social skills. This requires free time to enter into play-bound negotiations without being overscheduled, or hurried from one activity to the next, and includes uninterrupted time where parents aren’t interfering.
One way to make sure kids have time to play is to actually schedule in empty space, sometimes called white space, during the day. I’ve always been intrigued by the empty spaces in life. I think those empty spaces hold the juice, whether it’s a moment of quiet reflection, the time between relationships, the moment before something big happens, maybe it’s the anticipation of something next or the opportunity to truly tune in, but the practice of empty space can level-up our daily experience.
Block out white space for your children to free play, without scheduling an activity. Create the opportunities for interactions with other kids and then leave them alone. Let your kids know those times are coming and when they’re coming, so they can relax and know that need for competency, choice and connection is going to consistently be met. You might consider providing such opportunities in the real world, so kids don’t need to go looking for them in the online world. This doesn’t mean you need to tightly schedule your day, though that works for some, but it does mean that you block out times for deep work and times for white space. Beyond blocking time, you don’t have to do anything. It’s not another job for us overworked, overwhelmed parents. Instead, create the space and get out of the way.
Many of my parents create no-tech zones and then make sure there are other options for kids to choose. As writer and poet Dorothy Parker said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
While homeschooling you have the opportunity to learn in just about any way you choose. Can you tap into the benefits of play? Can you offer rather than instruct? Maybe fewer opportunities to work, but more opportunities for what’s meaningful.
When I spoke with Rachael, I found her perfectly reasonable. She wanted to learn new things and she was curious about a lot, but she also wanted to play with her dolls and not be bossed around all day. Rachael made a plan for some doll play and some time for superpower practice and some time for conversation about curiosities and investigation into those interests. Rachael mostly wanted to be heard, to come up with some of her own ideas about how to proceed and that’s what she did. She made a daily schedule for herself, including all of the things she found valuable and her mom was surprised that those things she herself found important were on the list. Choice and self-agency are powerful motivators and they helped Rachael feel excited to learn. For Rachael, that seemed to be enough, but for other kids a larger learning makeover may be necessary for it to feel playful and engaging.
Jimmy described his experience of going to a well-known, local, standardized tutoring service as going to jail. He went several times a week, sat in a small cubby, completing worksheets and progressing through their very rigid, pencil and paper-based standards. The vendor kept telling Jimmy’s mom that he was not paying attention and that he was distracted.
The service used rewards for completion and it’s true…kids do respond to external rewards and trinkets for completion of tasks they really don’t want to do. In other words…it does works. The question for me is…at what cost? When we reward kids for learning, we undermine the love of learning for its own sake, propelled by curiosities and wonder. We learn to get the reward, not because we are interested in knowing more or acquiring information or skills that we need to achieve our goals. There’s no meaning to the task and so we’re taught that learning is relevancy-void. Kids hurry through just to be done with it, rather than taking pride in their work and if there’s a way to get around it and still get the reward, they’ll find it.
And, certainly we know they may not remember what they've supposedly learned. None of this is what we want for our kids and it’s not what we want for our work force. Yet, it’s what we train, especially in places like Jimmy’s tutoring. When I had a talk with Jimmy’s mom about his experience of jail, she was reflective for a moment and then she said, “I guess it is like jail.” It’s easy to fall into tutoring like that because the businesses are well-known chains with multiple locations and the corporations pay for advertising and marketing that all make it seem like the best possible thing for your child. When we don’t know, we will go with something that seems popular. If we think about it, there are only two other places that operate under the restrictions that we find in school and in school-like programs like Jimmy’s. Jimmy nailed it when he said it felt like jail, that’s one of the places that takes away freedom. The other is the military. The difference, though, is that kids have neither made the choice to go to school, as people in the military typically choose and they haven’t done anything wrong that would end them up in jail. We adults simply take autonomy from kids for their own good. Hmmm. Maybe your child has enjoyed and progressed rapidly at one of these structured tutoring businesses. If it works, it works. I’m not suggesting it’s never a good choice. What I am suggesting is that there’s a lot to think about when making such a choice. And above all, we need to listen to the experience of our child. Anything that feels like jail probably isn’t a good thing for learning and maybe that’s one reason why so many kids have a negative experience of school.
We’ve talked about the feelings and experience of play and there’s one more contributor that I’d like to share called the Primacy/Recency Effect . Basically, the primacy/recency effect means that we remember best what comes first and what comes last. You may want to consider that effect when planning learning experiences with your child. If we want kids to enter into a learning activity with optimism and good feeling, we might want to make sure we start and end learning activities with those same positive feelings. Whether it’s through playful engagement, upbeat music, humor, engaging snacks or resources, etc., pay extra attention to your beginnings and endings.
If you want to learn more about curiosity and finding a rhythm of the day that honors play and learning, come on over to boldschoolers.com and join us in Boldschoolers Blueprint.
Leave me a comment: Does your daily rhythm feel like play? Is there value in that feeling of play for your child?
