Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me Kim John Payne. I just wanted to take a brief little moment to remind you that we have a Care Professionals seminar coming up this coming weekend actually on September 17th and 18th. I'm always thrilled by these Care Professionals seminars and this one is called Empowering Kids, an anti-bullying seminar for Care Professionals, counselors, teachers, all sorts of people working with kids.
It's it's all about avoiding under and overreacting with kids social struggles, spotting early warning signs, identifying tools that they need to break out of stuff like cyberbullying. It's a weekend thing. It's just two hours on three hours on Saturday, three hours on Sunday, and you can get all the details of that right at simplicityparenting.com. So if you're a Care Professional educator interested in helping kids who are being marginalized and isolated, yeah that might be a really interesting thing to to check out.
Okay, this week I wanted to talk about a subtle thing about children's play, about sharing toys and materials, but also something a little little more grounded than that. And it really does revolve around this whole question of whether you share or take turns. Now I've mentioned this a little bit before in a previous podcast, but just a quickly review before moving on.
Sharing is it's great, you know, it's a very sort of high order thing. Some kids, given the right kind of play environment, share quite naturally. Where play is a little bit, you can often get a bit of a clue here, where play is a little bit tense, stressed, the kids don't know each other so well.
Could be one reason they don't share. Another reason could be that the play is a little bit hurried and they're kind of trying to supercharge their play. I've mentioned that before in a podcast too, where there's not enough playtime.
You know, they don't, they sense it's coming to an end very quickly and they're going to make all these different transitions so they will play in this, I call it a supercharged way, but and they get very defensive and protect their toys. So there's another aspect, another reason kids find it sometimes difficult to share. One of the ways you can ramp a child up into sharing, as many of us know, is that you emphasize, you don't emphasize on that so much, you put your emphasis there, you put your emphasis on turn-taking and you often have to supervise turn-taking a little bit more closely if the play is a bit tense and not flowing very well.
But turn-taking can help an awful lot so that you have an agreed turn-taking and if the play isn't particularly not going well then you become the arbiter of the turn-taking. So for little ones you would very practically say, I'm just going to go over and clear up the counter or I'm just going to go and get the coats ready or, you know, do a little tidy up, but you kind of stay in the area, you stay nearby. And then when I come back after I've finished tidying up on the counter that's when there'll be a new turn.
And rather than saying five minutes, in five minutes we'll change over, that, you know, five minutes is very, doesn't have a big meaning at all to little kids. All it means is, you know, soon doom approaches. But if they can actually see you doing something, that also is helpful.
Another aspect of turn-taking and sharing is that it's a lot easier for children to have turn-taking if there's a replacement. Now again, I know this is very obvious so I won't dwell on it, but if a child is having to give up a play object, it's really great that they either get a replacement with another, you know, good thing to play with or a much better replacement is you, actually. They get to be with you just for a few minutes or you might sit with them and just tell them a little story about when you were young or when their daddy or grandpa got into trouble when they, they're the favorite stories aren't they, when we did something naughty.
But the replacement, the best kind of replacement, is actually ourselves. And so we turn the object or the dolly or the car or whatever it is over to the other child to take a turn, but try not to walk away at that point. Try to stay close and actually give them the little gift of just a minute or two of your time, the gift of connection.
And in that way they don't feel bereft. Now one other thing I wanted to mention about sharing and turn-taking is that I think it's reasonable for a child to have toys, play objects, crafting stuff that is theirs. I don't really see a problem with it.
So what about just a little play, just a little basket where and into that are the just mine. They're the just mine things and they actually don't have to share those unless they want to. If they want to, it's fine but I'd be a little bit careful that they don't over control the play through doing that.
But the just mine objects are important. When other kids come over for play dates and tensions start arising, it's usually because very special things to a child start getting played with in ways that your child doesn't like. They're being treated roughly or not well and they're special.
So what about before a play date, for example, there's some things that go in the just mine basket and that just mine basket goes away. With children coming over, they won't really understand the just mine basket so it probably has to go away. With siblings, they do understand actually the just mine basket and it's a little basket.
It's not some huge thing that thousands of toys go into. But they do understand that and they each get a just mine basket and they can have that. Now again, if they want to share that, that's absolutely fine but there's not this sort of subterranean sort of wish for a parent, you know, imposing that on a child that they share every last thing.
The objects in the just mine basket can change as time goes on and things are not so precious anymore. And it's actually quite interesting when I've seen children have just mine baskets and they put things in it and that's got to be carefully curated because they can't be putting things in their just mine basket that actually belong to, that don't belong to them, you know, that are played with together with their siblings. But when you do that and you curate it carefully, one child can have their just mine basket, the other child can have their just mine basket and when there is a play dispute about objects and materials, it's a little bit easier to say, you know what, let's not do sharing today or even turn taking.
You can default all the way back to the just mine basket and you can say to them, let's just have some time with the just mine baskets. And that often settles children right on down because the adrenaline can drain down, the cortisol can drain down, the feistiness can relax and they know basically they're being brought back to like base camp of safe play because that is the just mine basket. And then you can build out again by perhaps turn taking or even sharing.
But you don't have to get stuck in this loop where there's this, that you're expecting children to share or even expecting them to take turns. It's a really good default position to take children back to and it's work to treat for many, many kids. Okay, that's it for today.
A simple little thing but boy can it actually help out with play disputes and settling kids down. As always, do feel free to contact me, right on our fancy new website. You might take a look at Simplicity Parenting website because gosh, it's all new as they say and being redone and it looks gorgeous.
I'm so grateful to our team. And you can go right there and if you want to request a consult with me in my private family counseling practice, it's right there. You'll see it.
But check out the website. I think you'll love it. The artwork is gorgeous and it's just, it's always, it's always lovely to see fresh and new things.
Anyway, that's it for today. Okay, bye bye.
