Playing with my kids

I’ll confess straight away. I am not the fun one. It used to bother me that my husband was just naturally so much more entertaining and creative when playing with the kids, whilst I felt awkward and less able to ‘let myself go’. If anything, I have a distinct knack for taking the fun out of things with my pedantic obsession of correcting mistakes.

But I learnt very quickly, my children do not love me any less because I am not that fun to play with. It’s just not my job. I have enough of those as it is, so I was happy to delegate this one to my husband.

Many a time, my children will approach me at home and say “I’m boreddddd”. I will always suggest things they can do/play and when that does not tickle their fancy, I simply shrug my shoulders and say, “Oh dear, that sounds like a you problem then“. And yes, this does work for me now, but it may not be the case if you’ve been much nicer than me and entertained your children upon request.

I always like to offer my children an option. For example, if they tell me they are bored, I may suggest they build a house from Lego or draw their favourite animal. Sometimes they take one of my choices, other times they opt for something they have chosen. At least I have narrowed down the list of ‘things they don’t want to do’ by two!

But I stand by options. If they continue to pester me, I just simply ignore them and repeat the choices but add in the option of “or something you would like to do instead”. This usually makes them think a little harder about whether they want to play with me or they want me to facilitate the play. If my child asks me to play with them, I do, but I let them lead the imaginative play or choose the board game. I am happy to participate, but I am not there to do all the hard thinking for them. That’s what they need to learn to do.

Real life example: I just sent the girl (7) and boy (5) to bed and said they can read for a little before lights out. The boy had clearly been procrastinating upstairs and came down to tell me he didn’t know which book to read. My initial reaction was, “well you can’t want to read a book that much if you can’t pick from all the books up there”. But then I realised, it is hard to make a decision when you have so much choice. So rather than take the decision making process away from him, I told him to go and choose two books he would like to read and then I will pick from these. He came down with two books and I chose the ‘Oi Aardvark!’ one. He looked disappointed and said, “Oh, but I like the robot book more”. Brilliant, read that one then! He made the decision, I just narrowed it down for him!