Have we forgotten ‘How to Play’ with our children?
2 years ago this realisation hit me: I don’t know how to play with children.
Just after Covid, my daughter’s school did an event in a public garden. The idea was that Covid had ended and the school wanted parents to take kids outdoors and let kids play. We went to that event.
As the founder of the school asked parents to gather children, most of us started calling names of our kids: beta, idher aao or hi, we are starting etc. But it was just hard gathering the kids together.
Then suddenly the founder of the school started smiling broadly, cheering, singing and gathering the kids. Lots of people in the garden started looking at what is happening.?And as parents, we were a little embarrassed. But in 2 min the kids came together in a circle. This is when I realised that I don’t know how to play with kids.
It is possible I had never known it in the first place. Or maybe I had simply forgotten ‘how to be a kid’.
And in the last two years, I have changed considerably. I am no longer afraid of making an ass of myself based on norms of the society. I am ok to climb trees with kids, jump here and there, and be more playful. Which a lot of times just means following the child’s lead. That has helped me become more like a kid again. And the journey has been joyful.
A few years ago I took my daughter to the pool. I wanted to do an experiment: that dekhte hai meri beti kitne der paani mein rehna chahati hai? So I took her to the pool with no end time in mind. It took 2.5 hours for her to say she was done and wanted to go home. 2.5 hours even though we were the only ones splashing in the pool, and there was not any other person in sight.
Today my daughter is 7 and she has always avoided swimming classes. But she is always eager to go to a pool or a body of water. I remember a conversation with her:
She said: Dadda I was born to swim!
I said: great. So do you want to learn to swim?
She said: no, I will learn myself.
And over the last 4 years of going, she has learnt to swim herself. Learnt not to be a district champion, or to have an extracurricular tied to her to get admission in sports quota but enough to save herself in a deep body of water. And she seems really happy with learning it by herself when she wanted to, and at the pace she wanted to learn while having fun.
This memory came back to me because I was talking to a mother who recently started taking her 21-month-old to the pool. And she said that in her society’s pool, both of them were the only ones splashing about. Multiple parents came to ask if she was ‘teaching swimming’ or ‘how they could put their child in swimming’. But when she said she was just playing with her daughter all of them went away. In the brief Bangalore summer when swimming under the hot noon sun is truly enjoyable, parents came to enquire about swimming but nobody came to splash with their child in the water.
A child has no particular interest in learning to swim. But a child has a lot of interest in playing joyfully without an agenda. And in that joyful playing, they might just learn to swim.
As I reflect on this and see so many parents going to the pool to enrol their kids for swimming classes and not to splash I think the sad part is not that we might have forgotten ‘how to play with children’ but that we might have also forgotten to just ‘let our children play’.
领英推荐
In this busy purposeful world that we now live in this might just be the tragedy of our generation.
Solving this is simple: Take your child outdoors and just let them play. And if you can then be a little silly and play with them :-)
??? Kitabon se kaise karein pyaar
Our 5 min podcast is about reading books.
Why do some children read books and some don't? What can you do as a parent? The environment creates the child. Parents create the environment. It is as simple as that. Or is it?
???Listen now
To stay updated with all the research on parenting and children, do check:
Press a button to share it with other curious parents ??
Vice President at Accenture, Ex- Deloitte, Aon Hewitt | #Talks about transformation
1 年Playing with children, like children, is the best bonding time! we paint all over our floor, make footprints, build waterfalls in the bathroom, paint on the walls, get dirty in sand, collect sticks and stones, race across muddy puddles and jump on autumn leaves.. its not crazy, it is how it should be :) The flip side to this is that my son enjoys his outings only with me and would not go out with others, but that's a price I'll happily pay
Associate professor, Neonatology at AIIMS Nagpur
1 年Very very relevant points and very important issues mentioned here amazing write up congratulations Harpreet Singh Grover by the way I’m one of those parents who gets weird looks and sniggers from others including elders in my building community who see me playing downstairs with him endlessly including silly games like throwing stones one after the other onto the slide and seeing them slide down. At odd times of the day come rain come sun. Became thick skinned to the small town mentality of the place where I live. Bengaluru is much better with regards to parents taking children out to play etc I find a refreshing change every time I visit my family in Bengaluru. And I find it not such a struggle or conflict to take him out to play here in Bengaluru . Yet like the example u mentioned there r many ways in which over achieving parents still are trying to strangulate their kids. U mentioned one example from Bengaluru while yes such parents r everywhere the place where I live currently is the epitome of competitiveness they don’t believe in allowing kids to play in schools here Playschool means place to ready them for schools. And they insist on making sure kids learn upto 1000 by the time they’re 4 ??
Associate Director - Strategic Partnerships - ApplyBoard || Ex - Filo, Narayana Group & Next Education
1 年Hi Harpreet I always cherish reading your post, so relatable
A Banker who striving to create mammoth Impact in Lending Space !
1 年Lovely interpretation Harpreet
Turning complexity into opportunity
1 年Interesting and eye-opening PoV Harpreet! Thanks for sharing your valuable insight.