The Gift of Play- A Guest Post
She must have been four or five years old then. I can remember myself being doubled over on the floor of the dairy section at our local Walmart, sobbing. Life as a mother had gotten the best of me that particular day, as it often can in our life with littles.
When I came to, I noticed a sweet middle-aged couple had approached my grocery cart and were smiling and relating so well with my daughter. “We have a son with Down Syndrome. He’s grown now.” These were my people. “I remember it getting easier when he was twelve,” the mother comforted me. Twelve. That was the magical age.
This whisper of hope continued with the growth of each new year, as well as with the growth of our family. The phrase, “life will be easier when she’s twelve” encouraged a theme in my inner monologue: “this too shall pass,” “if we can just get past diapers,” “just a few more years and things will be easier.” Each prase, always a glimmer, always a hope. What I didn’t realize, though, was that with these hopes I was inevitably, albeit unintentionally, wishing their childhood away; wishing my children into adulthood.
Today, my oldest is ten years old and quickly approaching twelve. And here I am, trying with all my heart to preserve her childhood. To preserve childhood for all three of my children. Because childhood is beautiful. And childhood is important. And they’re not ready for adulthood. They need to continue to experience life as children; to build forts and play mommy and create through messy art. They need space to just be children.
In this current season of life, my children are all that of school-appropriate age. So, in our home, this preservation looks like a delicate balance of learning and playing, and learning while playing.
We structure our daily rhythm around three important pillars: meal times, sleep times and free play. Free play being the most important of the three. Having children beyond toddler years, our day does involve a generous amount of focused time in reading and writing and mathematics, but we only do so with the understanding that none of the above three pillars suffer. Especially play.
Free play is such an essential key to a good and healthy childhood. It allows children the opportunity to create and imagine. It allows them the opportunity to process and express their own experiences and to strengthen skills that they will need later on in life. It allows them the opportunity to breathe.
Let me be honest. I’m a box-checker. I make lists for the sake of being able to check off boxes at the end of the day and feel accomplished. So, to protect play in our home, we follow a pattern that is found in many Waldorf-style schools and homes, known as breathing in and breathing out. (This ensures that no one turns blue in the face when mama suggests that we “just complete one more math page”.)
Breathing in for us often looks like collectively sitting on the sofa together, reading lots and lots of books. Lately, my children have found an interest in all things early American: from the pioneers that grew up around the time of Laura and Mary of The Little House Series to the Colonial People and Abraham Lincoln. We read until their interest peaks and peters out, and then we breathe out. More often than not, my children rush to their pile of dress-up and pull every colonial-looking piece or Lincolnesque top hat and play the life of those once lived. This is play, and this is learning. The balance of breathing in and breathing out.
This art of breathing can also look like spending an hour in the kitchen alongside me. All three of my children, chopping and mixing and peeling, working with their hands in a way that is building a skill, as well as creating a memory. They are breathing in an experience that I’m giving them, while preparing to process through the art of mud pies and rosemary and potato soups in the backyard during free play.
Along these same lines, there are many ways that we collectively breathe in and out through our day. With academics at play in our home, we find ourselves sitting down for math lessons, working our way through a page in a reading book, practicing writing skills through the act of notebooking, but we balance this in-breath, with an out-breath. With exploring and creating and playing.
Rudolph Steiner wrote that
“if a young child has been able in his play, to give up his whole living being to the world around him, he will be able in the serious tasks of later life, to devote himself with confidence and power to the service of the world.”
Are we, as parents, effectively bracing our children in their childhood by allowing them this freedom of play, this balance of in-breaths and out-breaths, that are essentially preparing them for the day that they enter adulthood? Are we helping build in them confidence and power to serve well when their time comes?
Play is a gift and it’s ours to give to our children before this season comes to an end.
Find her at The Intentional Childhood.