Don’t play with your kids. Live with them

Thoughts about modern parenting pressures, nurturing your children, and not losing yourself in the process

There is little to be gained from trying to work which generation of parents had it easier. Suffice to say that along the profound joy, love and meaning that comes with parenting, parents have always faced challenges, big and small. Many parents in Australia today are confronted not only the ‘hard pressures’ of ensuring their children are fed, clean, watered, clothed and housed, but also ‘soft pressures’ like ensuring their children become emotionally secure, compassionate and well-rounded people.

One area where this pressure may be felt is in the area of play. Parents can feel pressure to be constantly attentive to their children, to be constantly playing with and entertaining them, heaven forbid they develop emotional or self-esteem issues from not being nurtured enough. There are of course the times when playing with children is a beautiful, joyous, hilarious experience for parents, whereby parents are invited to reconnect with their own inner-child and for a moment shake off the seriousness of being an adult in 2024. But then there are the times when a parent may feel pressured to play when they don’t actually want to. Indeed, as people often do for others that they love, the parent may feel worn out and want some space, but nonetheless be willing to dip into their last energy reserves in order to help their child to have some fun and feel loved.

But I feel that some unhelpful things can happen when parents play with their children from a place of pressure and ‘shoulds’, rather than from a place of love and willingness. One of the obvious risks is that if a parent is constantly pushing themselves beyond their own capacity to meet the either declared or projected demands of their children, they risk burning out and at some stage falling in a heap. From the child’s perspective, we know that they are sponges and that they absorb a lot, even things that they do not consciously know they are absorbing. As Kiwi Psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall once said, “the babies first reality is the mother’s [sic] unconscious”. In other words, babies and children pick up not just on what we say, but perhaps even more so on what we do, how we are, and what we feel. How might the child interpret their parent’s non-verbal signs that they don’t seem to actually want to play with them? Perhaps the child deep down worries that they themselves aren’t fun to play with? Perhaps they feel like a burden? Perhaps they feel that they are a cruel despot who must be placated? Someone said to me recently ‘a good “no” is better than a bad “yes”’. A ‘bad yes’ is begrudgingly doing something we really don’t want to do. We all know what it feels like to be on the other side of that. It can make us feel anxious and guilty, and ultimately, we might wish that the person had just said no in the first place. Beyond the feelings that may arise in a child in situations involving ‘coerced play’ with a parent, there is the issue of what the child learns from these interactions about boundaries and the attention given to the self. It could be that a child learns from their parent that one must subjugate one’s own feelings and needs in order to meet the needs of another. Needless to say that this dynamic doesn’t set one up well for mental wellbeing and healthy relationships later in life.

I must apologise for the click-baiting title. Of course, playing with your children is healthy, fun, and in many ways absolutely vital to their development. I may be saying this a couple of paragraphs too late, but I am in no way going down the ‘kids of today are too pampered and wrapped in cotton wool and need some tough love’ route. What I am saying though is that as important as play is, the terms on which parents offer it are also important.

Further, I believe there is an alternative. Rather than interactions with children being partitioned into ‘life’ and ‘play’, children can be closely involved in aspects of adult and family life, to everyone’s benefit. There is nothing new in making everyday activities fun for children. In fact I would guess that this has happened for as long as their have been parents and children. But I believe in many cases incidental play and education through involving children in activities of daily life provides almost unlimited and often untapped potential. Trips to the shops, the post office, raking leaves in the garden, or hanging out the washing, have the potential to be points of learning and connection in ways that contrived play can’t. Somewhere inside, children know that they will be adults one day, and they are often curious about the things we do and how we do them. Beyond observational learning, children yearn most of all to connect. They want to be with their parent. They want to know them and be known themselves. In a scene from the TV series Ted Lasso, Roy Kent says to another parent “Most adults think kids need to be constantly entertained… Truth is they just want to feel like they’re a part of our lives”. Kent then demonstrates, asking his daughter Phoebe if she wants to come his podiatrist appointment, to which she enthusiastically responds, “Yes please!”.

Living life together with your child provides an opportunity to move from what can feel like a ‘transaction’, where “I’m your parent so I will play with you to get you off my back”, to something more like a relationship, a knowing of each other and a being with each other, in simple and special ways. Again, I suspect that none of this is new. Kids from cultures older and wiser than ours seemed to get on just find with Fisher and Price, Mattel, or even the expensive wooden Montessori toys. If parents can somehow let go of all the ‘shoulds’, perhaps there will be space to be present, to be curious, to be open and to connect. Perhaps as well it will be another step on the parent’s own journey of acknowledging and attending to their own feelings, whilst the child quietly watches on, learning how to be generous and connect with others, without losing themselves in the process.