Hello and welcome back to Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This is a special series where I do my best to answer questions that arose in the television episode of San Quarantine, or live from San Quarantine, hosted by Jewel, who kindly invited me to come along and speak on that series about parenting and children. Many, many questions came in, and there were a number that clustered around, how much should we play with our kids? How much, now that they're at home so much, should we be actively being their playmate? And this is a great question, and it often comes up.
Now, one of the things to understand that I find terribly important is when children play, they are digesting the world. Key point. That when they play, they play from the inside out.
They've taken from the outside in, they've taken the world and all that's going on around them, and then from the inside out, they play it, play it out. One quick example. When my children were little, they went along to the pediatrician for an annual checkup.
They were quite little, and it was a busy kind of doctor's office, and there was the checkup, and I fully expected them when they came home, they were going to play, you know, something about doctors or something about the nurses or whatever it was, but they actually didn't. They, what caught their attention was all the insurance, all the health insurance questions that, and the many, many, many questions around health insurance and all the forms about health insurance, and welcome to the USA. And so they got home and they got a big box, the one they would often turn to that the refrigerator came in, you know, sometime before.
They cut out a window and they established the health security office, and we were watching as they lined up all their dollies and each other would be in the line sometimes. They tried to line up the dog and the cat. The cat wasn't into it.
The dog was okay for a while, but everyone was lining up and they would, and then one of them would open the window with grumpy demeanor and say, yes. And then they spent hours making forms in little lines. They weren't, neither of them were writing very well yet, and so they made up these forms in tiny little squiggles on, and they asked me for a clipboard and they gave me this, they gave the dollies and each other the clipboard, which had to be, it must have had at least like 20 or 30 pages.
I mean, they had this whole thing down, right? The grumpiness, the abruptness, the forms, oh gosh, and they played it out and they played that game for three, four, five days. Really well into the week, they were still playing health security office. Now, clearly that experience left a mark on them from the outside in, that it came from the outside, this unexpected health security office.
And then it went into them and the way in which they cleansed that experience, which was disturbing to them, was to play it out. They took it in. It was disturbing.
They cleansed the disturbance by going into a deep, creative play and playing it outwards, releasing it. They absorbed it. They released it.
Now, did myself or Catherine help them set up that play? Sure we did. We hauled the box out and they wanted us to be in the lineup. And for the first couple of times we lined up in the health security office as well, because they were quite insistent that we needed to do that.
And that was all fine. And then after a few minutes, one could just sit to one side and they said, no, daddy, you have to be in the line. I said, no, you know what? I'm just in the waiting room.
Oh, okay. So you can start to, when children play like this, still within the imagery of their play, you can step to one side. And then after more time has passed, then they're into their play now.
And you're not such an important figure. And you can stay proximal, you can stay nearby. You can, you know, if they're playing in the room adjacent to the kitchen, you can just go to the kitchen and start preparing supper or whatever it is you're doing or lunch, but you're no longer in the play as a key imaginative character.
Do they need you to be nearby? Sometimes, particularly when they're getting used to this, uh, they're getting used to you not being a key figure in play. And I mean, even if it's an only child, even if they don't have other, this, this works perfectly well with one child as much as it does with, with 10 children, same deal, stay proximal. And if they beg you to come back and play, then say to them, well, what's coming next and get them to describe the play to you and be very interested in it, but don't take them out of that play land, out of that deep creative play, be interested and say, oh, and you might even go over if they get upset and just sit on the sofa again nearby, but as much as possible, don't enter back into the play.
And if you do, then see it as, as the circles, so that you've gone into that central circle of creative play and then move out to the next circle and then a wider one still until you're now out again. And it might need you reentering two or three times and then stepping back two or three times, but do that over a week, a two or three, and you start to see children be less and less dependent on you desperately sometimes to be their playmate because when we can step back like that, it creates space for deeper play. And right now it's crucial that children go into deep creative play because so much is coming at them.
They're aware that all sorts of things have changed. Things are rippling around them. They're not in their normal rhythms.
They're not going to kindergarten or to school, or they're not seeing that a lot has changed. Bless their little hearts that, you know, that they're having to cope with right now. And so allowing them to dip down into deep creative play, we can certainly siphon it, start to, we can start it off.
But once that siphoned flow is going, once the play flow is moving, then we need to move out of the current and let that play flow move forward and find its own way with us sitting metaphorically on the riverbanks looking on, or perhaps drifting off back to camp, so to speak, so that the play flow that a child is invested in can go deeper and deeper so that they can take what's coming from the outside world right now and all the shifts and changes and disorientation, take it down, down, down to where the disturbance in their emotional life is without our distraction, without having to have conversation with an adult about it, and then without having to have too much conversation. Of course, a little bit is fine. And then out it comes, and it's a very sort of healing, cleansing gesture.
Now to the good number of people who wrote in one way or another about that key question, I sure hope that was helpful. Okay, bye-bye for now.
