Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me Kim John Payne. This week I wanted to talk about how to help children who are having difficulty playing together, siblings of course, but also at school. One of the things that I found most helpful over the years with difficulties in play is to apply a sort of a principle that we all understand, this is very natural and organic to us all in terms of our understanding of play, is to actually dial back the play stages.
Now what I mean by this, let me just give a brief overview, is pretty much most of us either know intuitively or we've looked at this and we understand it consciously, is that children go through all these play stages as they grow up. First of all they have the first little play stage is connected play where it's this little piggy, you know, went to market, it's all the little touching, connected, I connect with my mummy, my daddy, my guardian, I connect through touch, it's that kind of I connect with the world, the twinkle, twinkle little fingers and so on. So there's that very, very early stage and then as a child grows up a little more they start playing in a solitary way, they'll play with their car or a dolly or a little object or they'll explore a stone and a flower, something in the natural world and it's solitary play but it's also exploratory, it's not just solitary, they're exploring something deeply, you know, if indeed they're given time in this fast-paced modern life just to sit and it doesn't look like play but it really is and then as that play stage gets a little more advanced in its solitary play it moves into, now they're really playing, they're creating something, they're doing something and it's more obviously it moves from exploratory to solitary play, alone play, quite happy to play alone.
And then the next stage, there's all these little sub-stages as well but for the content, the context of today, I just want to cover these ones, then there's this parallel play and parallel play is when, you know, we've seen it all, haven't we? We've all seen it where they'll come alongside each other and one child's playing with a truck and pushing it backwards and forwards, zooming it backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards and another child, another little child will come and zoom their truck backwards and forwards. They're not exactly playing together but they're playing proximal to each other and so there's this proximal play or parallel play. Proximal play is a little bit different to parallel because the proximal play now is this little bit of a next step where a child will be playing with shoeboxes and building things in one part of the room, a sibling or a child at school, and then you'll see another child look over and start being inspired by that and doing their own box play and this is more proximal play now.
They're not exactly playing together, they might start, you know, trading tools or a interest of one little boy, little boy, girl, child will get up and go look at the other and then they'll go back to theirs. So it's proximal and they're being inspired and influenced by each other but they're not actually playing together, not like visually, not obviously, okay. So it moves from that parallel to proximal and then the next stage that I wanted to mention, there are other stages by the way, but I'm just talking about a context of how to help kids who are not playing well, so I'm trimming this down a little bit.
The next stage in play comes when kids then start interacting and they start exchanging and now there's a kind of a, there's a play which is more a dynamic play where they're actually playing together and you see it, they're engaging together, they're exchanging implements, precious things, they're exchanging materials and they're playing together and they're creating the same thing together. And then the next stage is sometimes called scripting play and scripting play and sometimes also there's an aspect of this which is called socio-dramatic. Socio-dramatic is the kind of play that is well classically dress-ups where kids play out archetypal roles and one will be the fire guy and one will be the police, one will be the cop, one will be and they'll start actually getting into these archetypal roles.
A lot of that is they're playing out the world around them so then now can you see they're becoming more and more aware of the world around them and they're playing that out. Then it moves into the second stage of script of socio-dramatic play which is scripting. I just love this scripting play you know where children say well you be like you be like the cop and and you you can be the like the doggy and then the child says no I don't want to be the doggy well well no you you be the you be the puppy then or I'll be the puppy but I'm a I'm a puppy that that bites no no no no biting and they and then I'll do this and then when I come in you can it's so beautiful isn't it and they spend such a long time scripting do you see they're scripting it all they're scripting it all out and then they move and then they play and it's still socio-dramatic and it's still dress-ups quite often but doesn't have to be it can just be this kind of scripting and and they're creating these scenes okay then a stage comes when it's more um it's getting into the realm of free play but they enter into it and this that you can see they enter into it through rule play now the scripting moves into rules like now we're going to play this game and I'm a little bit older now because all this is getting older older as the and now you know where where um we're sort of six seven years old and now we're going to play a game and it's a game and it has rules it's tag and when you're on base and when you're off base and how you can run and how many people can be on that base and there's now and you and you and the children move from scripting which is form creating form and even more form now into into rule play rule-based play and there'll be a big dispute and that and that might be you know a big argument and then you know hopefully they'll huddle together and then well what are we going to know and then there'll be a big shout um I remember children often would shout when I was in the school counselor listening to them in the playground helping them new rule new rule and they would have a new rule and I'd smile and think well well done them they've just made a new rule it can be quite bizarre but it's a new rule and that's rule play okay now and there's many other stages that come there's there's sports play where kids are not play they're not doing sports but they're playing at being at sports and sports people and so on all right now that's the context see these stages now let's say there's a seven or eight year old group of kids in the neighborhood or an eight year old or a six year old uh uh siblings playing together and it's scripted play and maybe even rule-based play because you've got an eight year old and a six year old and a five year old so it's slightly different stages but they're in the same ballpark right it's it's kind of close so there's they're scripting their rule playing and something really goes wrong and a big fight breaks out big argument well what to do what what to do one of the most elegant things to do is to be able to draw in close like morale metaphoric canoe right alongside and just ask them what's up just be a presence what's up what's oh something's going wrong isn't it and just empathize it's not going well my goodness and they'll say no because he won't be the the bitey dog is too bitey and and you know and just oh gosh and not not coming in heavy-handed you know what are you doing come on now let's get this worked out it's just approach it with an oh dear i just love this oh dear attitude oh gosh and just um now do you need my help to work this out or can you work it out yourselves because we need to work this out don't we that's another thing do you need my help or can you do it yourselves now very often when there's a big argument about this they do need some help all right now let's go walk down that road a little bit because even if they say they can do it by themselves you'll notice something very organic happens they will dial it back now what i mean by this is exactly what we can do is not keep them in rule play but dial them back into scripted play but if scripted play isn't going well take them back into proximal play where they can play now and they can both they can still play with their play balls they can still play with their their their forts but now they might work on different like you play you make maybe the window in the fort and that's right you yes you you make the you lay out what's inside the beds and all the sleeping area so now insert yourself because often we're wondering should we insert ourselves i think it's perfectly acceptable to insert ourselves but within the flow of their imagery around play but take them back one stage take them back now you might even take them back not even into proximal play but parallel play so they they actually let's say it's fort building or you know some kind of game the now they'll create their own stuff but they'll do it separately on a rainy day you might give them their own materials two different two different tables uh that you set them up on one on the counter one on the coffee table and you and you say let's just i think we can make it better just by playing in our own little space for a little while and then we might be ready to to to come back together again kids get really used to this and if you do it enough they start doing it themselves and it's delightful when you start seeing them do it themselves right if they can't manage even proximal or parallel play you can take them right back into solitary and if they can't and they're not happy with that right the way back into twinkle twinkle little stars but that's that's you would sit with a child and just read a story that's connection right but in a a big grown-up six or eight year old way or a five year old or whatever but you take them back and now their connection is with you and not with each other so they were having trouble with each other so you make that simpler they were having trouble still with each other so you make that simpler by connecting them to the play materials having trouble with that connect them to you and what you're doing is a really basic learning principle you know teachers do this all the time when they're introducing number work and math if a child doesn't get division then they might go back to multiplication don't get multiplication okay let's go back to to subtraction don't get subtraction all right let's just go back to addition let's go back just to adding up we we know this it's a it's a it's a very intuitive thing that we we do with learning and this is applying it to the play stages now i know that's a lot of play stages but it's basically um i hope i've laid this out clearly enough for you next time when the children are having trouble playing with each other rather than getting bothered by it it's so helpful to have a framework inwardly for ourselves at what we can do to basically recalibrate you're recalibrating and and you know what just as a last point you're actually asking less of their nervous system it's asking quite a lot of a child's nervous system to to be able to interact in this way and get into the flow of that and if their nervous system they're just this way too jangled that there's too much is going on they're overwhelmed you're just pulling it back and did you notice each stage you pull back you're you're moving into a calmer and calmer activity doesn't always have to be like that but often it's intuitively we we do that the child resets so to speak and then you can move them back out into the more sort of demanding socially and and and sensorially you're moving them back into more more complicated play all right that's a gem by the way this this to understand this this this movement back uh through the play stages gosh once you get this down um yeah a whole bunch changes in the way we help kids play and it doesn't have to become uh so charged okay hope that helps bye-bye for now
