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A Befuddled Adult’s Guide to Playing With Little Kids
Advice for people who don’t know how to interact with children
In theory, playing with a kid should be the easiest thing in the world. After all, there are no rules. There’s no script to follow. Don’t know what you’re doing? Just make it all up. In fact, making it all up is sort of the point.
And yet, as soon as my nephew takes out the Legos or blocks or PAW Patrol figurines, I turn into an awkward, bungling goon. Make the toy airplane fly? Okay, but, like, where to? And do I need to make some kind of flying noise? Are you sure you don’t want to watch a movie instead?
“Adults always have a self-consciousness about their play,” says Michael Follett, director of the international Outdoor Play and Learning (OPAL) organization. “To children, play is innate — an instinctive, evolutionary behavior — and the boundary between play and reality doesn’t exist. When a child is a dragon, they are a dragon. When you’re the dragon? You’re acting” — and this acting comes more naturally for some than for others.
The good news? The more you work at it, the better your play literacy becomes. And, for the sake of the next generation, you should work at it. Play is critical to emotional, cognitive, and social development — its importance to children has…
