Many parents are play-deprived

I have a great faith in human beings and I think we can get that back. I think that we can point out as we go along. I think we can talk to people, we can help them do it. I will tell you when we do good stuff and we have 100 teachers here we play a lot of games and we bring them along, non-competitive, that kind of wonderful fun thing that you can do so that they kind of get the feeling way down deep inside about what’s okay. But it is a different time. I just think I have enough faith in mankind to know that I think we can do this.

Things to think about

Do children in your program know how to play for play’s sake?
Do you find that play often turns into competition in your children?
Have you played with the parents in your school or program?

Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce

If our worth as a father, parent and educator of young children can be measured, let it be by the smiles and laughter I bring to my child’s and my life. We are so deeply conditioned to think of genius and wisdom as content, knowing lots of stuff. Genius or wisdom is not the things we know, rather it is the quality of our knowing. It is how we think and feel, not what we think we think and think we feel. Wisdom and genius are states, not content. My goal as a father and hopefully yours as an early childhood educator is to be completely open and attentive to how and what our children are relating to, to see that they are safe and by that encouraged to explore fully their experience. Wisdom is a state, joyful, happy. There is a series of books, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, What to Expect the First Year, and The Second Year, and so on. In this work the “terrible two’s” was given some currency. We terrible adults cause the “terrible two’s” by not being aware and in sync with the unshakable need to learn that is driving the show. Trust and respect are reciprocal. If we see, relate and connect with the authentic child, they will do the same with us. They may not understand the abstract need we have but they certainly know there is a need and will do their best to respond appropriately if they can. Alas, most adults are not imaginative. But we can be.

You know there is a huge gap between the way I played and the way this generation now plays. I’m just going to give you an example. One of the things that we do as a family, in addition to a lot of other things, is we just take a beach ball and the idea is that you can’t let it fall on the ground. And we just bounce it back and forth and everybody plays. The 3 year olds and the 70 year olds, they all play and they all bounce back and forth. I brought about ten beach balls to a parent meeting and I put out the chairs helter-skelter. Now there’s 100 people and I didn’t say anything. I just tossed the first ball. It turned into a spiking match which just stunned me. It moved me to tears and I had to think about it a lot. I didn’t say anything. I let it go.

I thought a lot about the way we play it as a family where there’s nothing that, nobody pushes it harder than somebody else. It’s just they were spiking it as hard as they could to maybe hurt somebody else. There’s that gap between what I know about playing like that and this generation. So bridging that in every way that we play is probably going to take some time. It’s going to take some energy. It’s like, to me, the greatest game that kids play is chase but they don’t take the kid down at the end and beat them up. It’s this wonderful game of chase. So some of these things have changed. I have a great faith in human beings and I think we can get that back. I think that we can point out as we go along. I think we can talk to people, we can help them do it. I will tell you when we do good stuff and we have 100 teachers here we play a lot of games and we bring them along, non-competitive, that kind of wonderful fun thing that you can do so that they kind of get the feeling way down deep inside about what’s okay. But it is a different time. I just think I have enough faith in mankind to know that I think we can do this.