As a psychotherapist who uses play therapy with young children, I often get questions about why I do this. I explain that play is the language of children. It is obvious that children cannot come to therapy and discuss in depth with insight the inner workings of their emotions and thoughts as most adults do. I also find that today many of the children and adolescents I see have not had enough time and space to engage in play, yet play is one of the most important factors in healthy child development. It teaches a range of often unseen abilities that serve children throughout life, such as:
- interpersonal skills
- creativity and problem solving
- logical thinking
- an ability to focus and be intentional
- resilience and persistence
- willingness to play by the rules
- shame tolerance and accountability.
At one level, play is merely play. But it is also a serious way for them to work through emotional problems. Because I use shame-informed therapy interventions I have developed with children, I also recognize that play teaches children the healthy balance between pride and humility — to win and lose gracefully and tolerate this experience with equanimity. (Check out my book on Addressing Shame in Child and Family Therapy.)
Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist and prolific author on child development, wrote in “A Good Enough Parent” (1987, quoted throughout) that play is “a serious undertaking on whose outcomes [a child] rests his feeling of self-esteem and competence.” (p. 268) Kids need to be very unserious before they can become serious about life.
Parents: Make Play a Priority
The problem is many children today do not engage in enough traditional, unstructured play after they are perhaps four or five years old. They graduate to screens and video games and rarely return to the physical, creative, narrative, and interactional aspects of freeform play. They likely have far too much adult-supervised play in the form of organized sports teams, dance lessons, or robotics clubs.
In addition, fewer families have multiple children, so that single children or children who are spaced far apart don’t have natural 24/7 playmates, unless they have a parent-organized play date with a friend.
Parent must show they value and make time for a child’s playtime. “For a child to gain such feelings of pleasure and self-worth from play, he needs his parents’ consistent corroboration of the importance of his play activities.” (p. 218)
Allow plenty of time, space, material and support for them to do this. Parental criticism and “education” is an essential part of raising a child, but is a very powerful message of shame and inadequacy. Be sure to balance that will lots of time where kids don’t have to “do things right.”
Play with your children can also forge bonds of emotional intimacy in ways that staring at a TV cannot.
Many parents today start children on academic learning too early, even as they may attempt to make it “playful.” Children have little joy in this type of play and may only engage in it to please the parents and spend time with them. This turns learning into an externally motivated task, which is the opposite of what is needed for lifetime learning and success — an inner-directed motivation, curiosity, and love of learning. Early over-focus on structured learning gives children a weapon to use against their parents in the future in retaliation for their pressure to achieve — they can just stop learning and doing schoolwork!
What Does Play Teach?
In younger children and infants, play is about mastery of objects and their physical body, and of interacting joyfully with caregivers. Older children transition into play that involves contests, which helps build self-esteem, resilience, and social skills. Because I work with children who often have issues with low self-esteem and sensitivity to shame, playing games that end with winners and losers helps me assess and build a child’s ability to lose. In a controlled setting they learn to experience and manage the feelings of inadequacy that losing provokes.
Play offers children a chance to engage in essential symbolic acting out of problems. Even aggressive play, such as shooting guns or “killing” a stuffed animal, allows kids to process frustration in a safe way. Parents should not take aggressive play too literally. Children rarely really want to kill someone! Kids just need to discharge their anger and frustration in safe ways through play.
“In his play the child tries to relieve inner pressures, to gain pleasure, to escape displeasure; and if this is not possible in reality, he escapes into fantasy and tries to achieve in imagination what reality has denied him.” (p. 248) Playing games allows a child to gradually acquire the ability to cope with the harsh realities of the world and manage life’s frustrations. The game itself and the social interactions and skill building experiences compensate for the frustrations of losing — and losing face.
In play therapy I generally go along with whatever fantasy a child is concocting and parents should do so as well when playing with children. Don’t ask why a child is doing something or interrupt with rational thought. This switches a child from fantasy to a real-world focus and they may likely start to play in ways that please the parent, rather than themselves.
For the same reason, don’t make adult assumptions and share them with the child: “Oh, you’re building with blocks so well. I bet you want to be an architect or an engineer like your mom.” These statements have more to do with adult worries about the future than with what a child is doing at the moment.
Children live in the immediate present and are not conscious of psychological reasons for their actions, nor should we make them conscious of them. So, too, should adults stay in the moment during play and even afterward with children. Too many parents are busy making each moment a teachable moment, inserting lectures and meaningful messages or insights that the child does not want or need. “In play, spontaneity and inner direction are of supreme significance; without them, much of the value of play is destroyed.” (p. 212)
Bettelheim notes that sometimes children engage in repetitive play for days or even months or years. Perhaps this is a signal of deeper, unmet needs or traumas, and may even indicate a need for psychotherapy, but sometimes it is just a child’s desire to work through important issues on her own. It can even indicate healthy persistence and goal-directed activities.
Encouraging Play
Many parenting experts advocate a return to old-fashioned simpler toys that allow a child to create their own worlds and encourage problem solving. You may even consider creating — with your child’s direction and assistance— toys out of sticks, broken objects, string and fabric, etc.
Physical games such as Hide-and-Seek or Tag also teach a child to control aggression appropriately within the rules of the game.
It appears that many children today do not engage enough in roughhousing with parents, siblings or peers. This type of physical play teaches many helpful lessons, including an understanding of how to self-regulate conflict and aggression in relationships, how to read social cues, and how to maintain relationships so that play continues. A child who is too aggressive learns quickly that his peers abandon play and the fun ends. Parents can suggest and participate in snowball fights, water balloon battles, and pillow fights. Roughhousing with parents can be a controlled environment where the parent can model self-regulation. Because the parent is physically stronger and more capable, the parent naturally reigns in their behaviors so as not to harm the child.
That said, if roughhousing gets too physical for your comfort, you should absolutely stop it, but without lecturing. Just simply tell a child, “That shove was too strong.” If the child does not regulate his energy and intensity, state again that he is being too physical and that you will end play. This will teach him that he must self-regulate or you will end the fun experience you were sharing. He should in the future recognize the need to regulate aggression to maintain the relationship — can you see the overarching adult message in that? Helping a child regulate excitement is an important emotional regulation skills.
Kids Learn To Make The Rules and Play By The Rules
I grew up playing with a group of neighbor children and in the summer we often congregated at a vacant lot. Choosing whether we should play softball, kickball, baseball or tag was the first order of business. Then we set about choosing teams and then setting up the rules (is it a home run if the ball goes into the street). Arguing about the rules (was that a foul ball?) seemed to take up most of our playtime! Little did I know that this was an essential element of play. Learning to create and play by the rules is an important aspect of socialization of children. Establishing rules also teaches rational thinking and negotiation skills essential in adulthood. Sadly, none of this occurs in adult-organized sports activities or video games today. The rules are all established and adults decide who strikes out or makes a home run. Video game developers arbitrarily decide that a character has X power or weapon.
“When adults step in to organize the game, they deprive the children of the personal growth they could gain through these engrossing preliminaries. All too often adults overlook the vast difference between the social situations of planning for the game and actually playing it. While they discuss what to play and why, and how to play it, the children are equal partners in a decision-making process, and they enjoy their ability to participate in a free given atmosphere. When they do this, they cooperate together, and a most enjoyable spirit of camaraderie is maintained. They feel accepted and secure with each other, because they are friends who share a lot with each other. “ (p. 258-9)
It may even be true that children prefer to spend most of their time planning, rather than playing, because this planning period involves the pleasant experience of cooperation, rather than of competition (and potential for losing).
Because children gain skills of self-determination in this process, parents should not hurry kids into playing a game. Let them argue about the rules. I believe this is one failure of video games — the planning and cooperation process of setting up rules is completely unnecessary.
Find a Balance Between Winning and Losing
When playing, children often realize they will soon lose a game, then suddenly change their behavior. They may lose interest in playing, try to cheat or change the rules to suit them, ask to restart the game or ask to change to a new game. Losing provokes feelings of shame and inadequacy that many young children are not able to handle yet.
“The reasons for the child’s behavior are not difficult to understand. Feeling himself momentarily defeated by the complex and painful realities of the game — he is losing, and thus his extremely tenuous self-respect is about to be damaged, something to be avoided at all costs — he reverts back to a play level at which the rules no longer pertain, in order to persevere inviolate his endangered feeling of competence.” (p. 268)
Don’t jump to the conclusion that a child who cheats will always cheat and become a liar and cheater as an adult. He is only doing this now because he lacks the maturity to handle defeat with grace. The more they strive to cheat and avoid losing, the more we can understand that the child needs emotional support to gain a sense of worth and strength that will permit him to lose in the future.
As a parent, use your judgment as to what to do in these situations. You may allow the child to duck out of the experience of losing, but there is also a time when you may insist that the child learn to handle losing.
Losing provokes feelings of shame and inadequacy in children that seem out of line with “it’s just a game.” But parents should find the balance of honoring the child’s fears of losing, but also seek to build skills of resilience to face and manage losing a game. Recognize that, to a child, the humiliation of losing is many magnitudes of weight more than you feel losing a game. How a parent responds in this situation is important. “Because a child’s inability to accept defeat in a game is a sign that at that moment he is quite insecure, it becomes even more important that we do not add to it further by our criticism of him.” I often recommend to parents that they become good at assessing if a child is stuck in shame — because this will guide your response. Piling on additional shame in the form of criticism — “Don’t be a baby. You lost. Accept it and let’s move on.” — will rarely be helpful to the child.
Play is Good For Parents, Too!
Too often parents are overwhelmed with chores, responsibilities and schedules, leaving little time or energy for play with children. I believe that relaxed, joyful play is good for parents too, allowing them to both de-stress and interact with children in ways that build a positive aspect to their relationship. We can all spend more time in the present moment!
Too much of parenting can involve directions and reprimands aimed at children. We need to balance that with pleasant interactions that build warm memories and experiences for the family. Put down your phone and let loose with your children — dance joyfully, wrestle in the leaf pile, build a snow fort or blanket fort, skip through the woods or tell a tall tale by the campfire. Start a family game night and make it a tradition. Not only is this fun for everyone, you will be actually building many healthy traits in your child that will serve them throughout their life.
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