Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Again, well done for making the time, this little sort of 10-15 minutes in your week. Should be easy, right, but it's not so often.
So here we are. Today I wanted to get fairly specific on a developmental stage, a play stage, that all children go through. It's called associative or parallel play, and little kids around two, three, three and a half, give or take, often really struggle at this stage.
And a lot of parents worry about the kids and how they're doing and so on. So we're going to be looking at that. We're going to be looking at how to handle when a child moves from one age and play stage to another, and how we can help them through that, one way to help them through.
Before that, I wanted just to let you know that we've got one of these care professional trainings coming up. It's kind of our fundamental care professional training. It's called Simplicity Parenting Family Life.
And this is for educators, care professionals, anyone working with families. It's pretty brief training, really. It's coming up on January 25th and 26th on a Saturday and Sunday, three hours on each day.
And it's for those people working with families that are trying to help them simplify, balance, how to help and assist and support a family to be able to get their shape back. I personally lead the training. It's live, online.
And it's just one of my favorite things to do is to gather together in groups and figure out how we can get family life back into balance and support those we care for and help be able to do that in a sensible way. All right. So that's coming up.
And all you need to do is go right to the link below or to the Simplicity Parenting website, and you'll see it there. Trainings, care professionals, and our team will get you all the information you need. Anyway, let's get back to the parallel play theme.
Parallel play, it's a beautiful stage of play. It's when kids sort of get alongside each other and they'll play their trucks or their dolls or their digging or whatever it is they're doing. And they will echo each other.
They will play beside each other and not necessarily interact all that much. It often reminds me of two streams that sort of weave in and then come back out and streams come in and then back out and they join and then they go their own and they get to a fork. So it's not always that kids are always paralleling, but you start to see it around two, two and a half, three, certainly by four, you know, most kids, you'll see this going on.
And it's when they develop really, it's when they start practicing their own little social skills, because they're mirroring someone else now. And if you think about what a social skill is later on in life, it's taking into account someone else's way of doing it, right? So you're absorbing someone else's way of doing it. It's a kind of a building block for empathy, really.
Now, it also helps kids interact with peers. So they're not just absorbing it, they're doing it. It's not they're not doing it with them, but they are doing it.
So there's an interactive piece there, which is so important. And it's sort of starts them off on a road of cooperation, even though it's not coming together. But what you watch little children play, and one will shift what they're doing, and the other will shift what they're doing.
And you can see the little buds of cooperation happening. And so, you know, you see all sorts of benefits in this parallel play. Actually, play experts usually put this as about the fourth stage or so.
You know, there's this receiving play stage, experts call it unoccupied play, but I don't like that terminology at all. But from birth up to about three months, there's when children receive play. It's the twinkle, twinkle little stars on their, you know, on their fingers, or this little piggy went to market, and you're doing it with them and you're touching their toes or their nose.
And a lot of body geography is going on, but also they're receiving, they're receiving your warmth and your love, but also your playfulness. It's a gorgeous stage up until three, four months or so. And then at around three, four, five months begins like a solitary play, an aloneness play, where children will occupy themselves and they will play so beautifully.
Just if they're left to, if we don't interfere with it, they can have just gorgeous times of just playing on their own, dressing their dolls, playing with their cars, digging in the sandbox, making their rivers. And there's many podcasts actually that touch on this theme of if a child calls you in, then come on in, but then slowly fade away and let them be able to get back into solitary play and don't overplay with children. Because this solitary play stage, super important, actually, that they start to develop the inside talk.
And you can hear them outside talking, their inside processes, you know, and so it's like, I think we're going to make this a really deep river. This is going to be a deep river and the boats are going to go really far. And they're talking out loud, they're in a process, but what they are doing is developing process.
And we can interrupt that if we overplay with children in those first 18 months or so, from about sort of three, four, five months through to about around about two years old, just give them time to play on their own. If they need some jump-starting, fair enough, jump-start them, give them the stuff they need, but then fade, fade out. Now, at about two, two and a half, around about there, there's this lovely stage of onlooker play.
And this is when kids check out another child playing. They'll sit on the edge of the sandbox and they'll watch, right? Or they'll be on their little bike or their tricycle and they'll sit on it, they'll pedal up and they'll just watch others playing and then they'll pedal away. And you can see them absorbing like, oh, I'm not on my own in this play world.
You can see them pecking at the shell, peck, peck, pecking at the shell of solitary play and they're breaking out into onlooker play, absorbent play, I sometimes think of it. They're absorbing, they're looking, they're absorbing, but they're not dynamically interacting yet. Now, here it comes at about three, give or take, through to about three and a half, four, five, it can go through to about four and a half, sometimes five, but usually around four is parallel play, or some people call it associative play, where, as I mentioned, little kids will echo each other.
They'll come alongside each other and they will play together a little bit, but they're not really doing that. They're paralleling each other. And it's lovely, sometimes the paralleling of each other, you know, they'll parallel stuff you kind of wish they wouldn't do.
And it's a lot of the time when kids bring words home that you think, wow, where did they get that from? Well, that's usually around sort of two and a half, three, four years old, because they're paralleling language. They're not just paralleling play, they're paralleling language development, and they can bring home some fairly colourful language. And sometimes parents ask me, is that normal? Like, we don't like that.
And I'll say, yeah, it's completely normal. And if you look at what they're doing with their play, they're doing exactly the same thing as they are doing with their language. So don't worry if they do it.
I mean, you're going to have to put some boundaries in place, right? But they are paralleling language. But this is the parallel play stage. We'll come back to that in a minute.
Then around about sort of four, four and a half, five, you see cooperative play start. And this is where children get more dynamically involved with each other. And you see them playing dress ups together.
You see them rehearsing the play. You see them negotiating the play. And it's the early stage.
The latter stage of cooperative play is scripting play around four, five, some kids earlier, some kids later. But they're like, you be like the scary cop, and I'll be like the really kind fire guy. And you do.
And they spend, you know, so long scripting it all out. And then they play it, right? I once heard a little boy say, well, I'm going to be the fire guy. And he went off and got a red feather scarf.
This thing was just magnificent, this red feather scarf. And another child said, fire guys don't wear red feather scarves. And this little boy said, well, this one does.
And then they all agreed that was OK. This one does. And off they went.
It was gorgeous. That's more cooperative play. And there are little sub stages in that.
OK, so then to explore parallel play a little bit more. And this is why I'm talking about it today. This image of this metaphor of what kids do when they're coming out of one stage of play, coming into another, is it can get a bit disruptive.
They can. It's like that metaphor of pecking out the shell, right? I'll see children doing this and they're peck, peck, pecking out of the parallel play stage. And they're going to this, you know, they're going to this sort of onlooker stage.
And they briefly go through that for about six months. And they start then wanting to engage from the onlooker, either the parallel or the onlooker stage, the absorbent stage. And they're pecking out of that of that shell, like, you know, like a little birdie.
And they start moving into other children's play and they can do it in a way that's not very elegant. You know, they can do it in a way that's disruptive because they don't know how to do it yet. And bless their little hearts, they're just figuring it out.
And sometimes it can look really disruptive. And they'll go back and they'll do it again. You know, and if we can see that as their little ways of first trying to come into cooperation and sure, they're getting it.
I don't know if they're getting it wrong, but I don't think it's wrong, but it's just they're not doing it sort of so, you know, beautifully yet. It's it's it's a little bit it's it's just a little bit teetering and tottering this way and that way, bit destructive, bit disruptive. But they are trying.
And if we understand that at around about three or four, that they are they're trying that they're trying to come into parallel play and they're not quite sure. The same is true when children move from this kind of associative or parallel play when they move into cooperative play. Then they're picking out, you see, of another shell.
Right. And they don't quite know how to cooperate. They don't know how to do it yet.
And if we can kind of at that stage, if them if that, for example, they're moving out of parallel and they're moving into that cooperative stage and and it's not going well, then I think we can insert ourselves just gently, just a little bit and and sit with the children because one child saying he's he's ruining everything, you know, and so just insert yourself, just sit quietly. You don't have to go into a whole bunch of words. And then and and just it's it's OK in that sense to not know what to do.
You know, it's OK for you not to not know what to do. It's OK for a child. They're not quite getting it right.
But this is the thing, you know, at this age, the mirror neurons, which I've talked about quite a bit in other podcasts, this child's ability to imitate. Here's the thing about this is that if they're not getting there, if they're not imitating very well yet, the other child's play, they're still, you know, finding their little legs in how to do that, then make it a little more obvious. Step in just again, not over talking it, not talking about their feelings and like, let's just all work this out.
Well, that's OK, too. Let's all work this out. But a really elegant way of doing it is to fire up those mirror neurons by doing something a little more obvious.
In other words, the way I think about it is that they're trying to read the playbook, but the print is too small. So make it large print, make it larger. And so sitting beside them and saying, well, I and you just pick up, let's say, a truck and you start moving it a little more slowly and you move that truck slowly and you move it into the garage and you park it there slowly and you'll see a child look at you.
And then you might bring it back out and then you do it again. Right. So they're looking at you.
Now, what they've done is that they're in that onlooker stage and you're doing it slowly to allow them to process. And so often they will then start doing it with you. So what you've done is that you've slowed that you've basically slowed it down and enlarged the metaphoric print.
You're now in large print parallel play and and you've slowed it down. You've made it a little more obvious what's going on and let them come right beside you and start to parallel with you. Now, at this stage, the child that, you know, the older sibling or an older child in a kindergarten, whatever, they're now happy because they're able to get on.
And then once they're doing it with you, they're moving their truck backwards and forwards with you, you can then just sit quietly, hold the truck, just sit quietly or even sit back a little bit, you know, literally physically move back and now open up their field of vision to the other child and then open up the field of vision to paralleling them. Now, here's one last thing. If a child's going to burst back into being disruptive, lean forward again and you parallel the other child.
Do you get it? You parallel what the older child or the other child is doing, but you slow it down, you slow it down, you make it obvious and then allow the disruptive one, so-called disruptive one to copy you, copying them. So, you know, and you don't have to do that for very long before you can sit back again and off they go with their paralleling. And both children are much happier for the whole experience.
And you've said maybe three or four words in the whole exchange. But what you've done is that you've taken a child into this beautiful associative play towards the cooperative play. And you can, when kids are really engaging into deep cooperative play, this is the last little point here, and a child coming from parallel to cooperative, right? It's a further stage.
If they're messing that up, if you've got a little sister who's messing up, like a three-year-old who's messing up the five-year-old's play, then insert yourself again and do exactly the same thing. If they're playing dress-ups, slow it down, take one or two of the dress-ups, this is by way of example, and you start now going into cooperation with the child who is being disruptive and saying things like, well, I think that crown is beautiful. I think that would be, oh, you want me to wear it? Okay, I can do that.
What crown are you going to wear? Now, there'd been a big dispute about crowns. But now you're talking to the child and the five or six-year-old is able to get on and do their dress-ups, their fancy lady dress-ups with their necklaces or fancy gentlemen with their beads or whatever they're doing. But you're now inserting yourself, slowing down the play.
So just as you slowed down the paralleling, now you're slowing down the cooperative. And what you're doing is basically calibrating with a child's neurological ability to process. And you're doing it in the simplest, loveliest way.
It doesn't need a lot of words. Don't get overly animated and goofy about it, just quietly. And so this way of inserting, slowing it down is a way to be able to help a child who's breaking through into a new play stage.
Okay, I sure hope that was helpful. Don't forget, though, the care professionals training, Jan 24th, 25th. If you're listening to this and that's already done, don't worry about it.
We have four of these a year. Just go onto the website, click interest list, and the team here will be right in touch with you when these trainings come up every year. They circle back around.
All right, that's it for now. Bye-bye.
