#13. Parent-Child Play: When Is It Real and When Is It Not?

If you play with your child because you think you should, it isn’t really play.

My last three letters (#10, #11, #12) in this Substack focused on the value of play among children who differ substantially in age. I presented evidence that even play between teenagers and very young children can be highly enjoyable and beneficial to both parties. So, that raises the question: What about play between adults and children, or, more specifically, between parents and their own children?

If you Google, “playing with my child,” and especially if you get more specific and Google “I don’t like playing with my child,” you will quickly find dozens of parents—mostly moms—who express guilt because they believe they should play with their child but don’t like to and therefore don’t do it as much as they believe they should. Here is a sample of quotes I just now picked up from the Internet:

• “I hate playing with my kids. And if you’re wondering what I’m thinking in those torturous moments, here’s what’s usually playing through my mind: What am I supposed to do here exactly? What do they want from me? How can I participate in this bizarre storyline? This doesn’t even make any sense! God, I’m bored. When will it end? How can I make myself useful in a different way without disappointing my child?”

• “I hate playing with my daughter and it makes me feel like a bad mom. … I just don’t want to play barbies or stuffed animals …. I feel so guilty.”

• “So, I love my kids, I read them bedtime stories (etc.)…. …But I don’t like to play! … He wants to play hide and seek, cars, etc. etc. and I just don’t want to. My husband doesn’t like it either, but he does it out of guilt.”

• “I like doing a lot of things with my kid, but playing isn’t one of them. … I’m wondering what kind of damage I’m inflicting on my kid by not wanting to play with him. Any thoughts?”

• “As crazy as it sounds, I just don’t like the way they play, and I get frustrated. …. My daughter loves to play barbies, but she always dictates the story and tells me what my barbie should do and has a meltdown if things don’t go the way she likes…. So, I do it her way but it’s just not fun.  …. It makes me feel like a bad parent because I’m not enjoying my time with her.”

Quotes such as these raise three questions in my mind, which I address in the rest of this letter.

Why Do We Think We Should Play with Our Kids?

As pointed out some years ago by anthropologist David Lancy (2007), a leading expert on children worldwide, the idea that parents should get down on the floor or ground and play with children is a uniquely modern, Western, wealthy cultural idea. Throughout most of the world, and until relatively recently even in our culture, it would be regarded as silly for an adult to do that. A parent might—for temporary amusement and just to be silly—do that for a few minutes, but not for long and certainly not out of a sense of obligation. Kids play with other kids. Adults have other things to do.

I think there are two reasons why we think we should be playmates for our kids. The first and most reasonable one is that we, as a society, have destroyed children’s natural social environment. Throughout all of history until very recently, children grew up in societies where they were surrounded by many people of all age, especially by other children, and this is still true in traditional, non-Westernized societies today.

For example, in a recent article in Current Anthropology, Gabriel Scheidecker (2023) described the life of infants and toddlers in a subsistence farming village in Madagascar (see my Psychology Today post on this). He points out that even while they are nursing at their mothers’ breasts, babies are looking away at other children, who seem to be always around, for amusement. By the time they are three years old, they are already spending 90 percent of their daylight time out of sight of their mothers, often out of sight of any adults, cared for by older children (who might be as young as 6) and playing with children over a wide range of ages. When he asked mothers about their roles in helping to develop their children’s minds, they insisted that this was not their job at all. Children develop their own minds as they play, explore, and in other ways interact with other children. That culture is a bit extreme compared to most others in the limited role of parents and expanded role of peers in children’s development, but essentially all cultures outside of our own are in that direction compared to ours.

We are living in what, for children, is a pathologically abnormal society in which children are largely isolated from other children. Nuclear families are smaller; extended families no longer live near one another; and, most significantly and tragically, most children are no longer free to roam and mix freely with other kids in the neighborhood. Almost the only times when children are with other children are in schools and school-like settings where play is forbidden or so strictly controlled by adults that it is not really play. So, recognizing that children want and need to play, and realizing that our children have nobody else with whom to play, we often feel compelled to be our children’s playmates, even though we are not biologically designed for it and are not very good at it.

The second reason why parents feel they should play with their kids is that they are regularly being told that they should, by psychologists and other “experts.” You can find many examples of such messages by Googling with such words as, “Why you should play with your children,” Here’s an example of such advice, which I just now found, from an organization called The Child Development Institute:

“Parents are encouraged to find time to spend playing with their kids on a regular basis. This should include one to one with each child and group time with all of the adults and kids in the home. … In pretend play, let the child develop the theme. Get into their world. Let them go with it. Ask questions. Play along. Be silly with them and have fun.”

According to the Institute, you are supposed to be silly with them, on their terms, but you are also supposed to work some teaching into it. The article goes on:

“Also, when appropriate, parents can use stuffed animals or puppets to act out real-life situations that can teach problem solving or social skills. Let the puppet demonstrate the wrong way to handle a situation. Then, along with input from the child, act out a better way. Afterward, let the child do the same.”

Hmm. In the first case you let your child dictate the form play (which no child playmate would allow). In the second case you allow play to devolve into pedagogy and follow the dictate not of your child but the child development expert. No wonder it’s not fun.

Why Don’t We Like Playing with Our Kids?

So, parents read such advice and believe they are not just supposed to play with their kids but are supposed to play (a) in whatever ways the child wants to play (get into the child’s world) and (b) in ways deliberately designed to teach stuff. Either of these ruins play.

As I read the posts by parents who confess to not liking to play with their kids it becomes clear that one problem is they have been convinced that they are supposed to let the child take the lead, and they go too far with that. They allow the child to become a little tyrant. Consider the mom whose daughter would dictate, in playing barbies, exactly what the mom was supposed to say and do. The mom here was allowing herself to be a prop, not a playmate. No self-respecting child playmate would tolerate being dictated to that way. “Either we play something we both want to play, or I’m out of here.” Maybe not those exact words, but something like that. To play just the way your child wants to play, with no negotiation or compromise or concern for whether you are having fun or not, is to teach your child to be a spoiled brat.

But a larger, more general problem, is that we adults are at a very different stage of life than are our children. Many of us can be “childlike” in some ways that we control, and that’s good, but we are not children. We don’t have the same interests, desire for repetition, sense of humor, or wild imagination as our children; and we have responsible, real-world things to do such as making a living, making dinner, and paying taxes. That’s a good thing. That’s what makes us adults. Some of us, for some periods of time, like to play in the ways that kids play and truly enjoy it, which is fine, but most of us have a limited capacity for it and there is no reason we should feel guilty about that.

Teenagers are usually better than us adults at playing with little kids, partly because they are closer to little kids in energy, interests, and humor than we are, but also because they are generally not interested in sacrificing their own fun to meet the perceived desires of their younger playmates. They don’t so much descend to the level of the little kids as boost the little ones up to their level. They find ways of playing that are fun for all, as I emphasized in Letter #10. If you wish to play joyfully with children, you might get some tips by watching teens and little kids play together if you get the opportunity.

Are There Mutually Enjoyable Ways for Parents and Kids to Play Together?

After all this, I have a confession to make. I do like to play with children, and I also have some fond memories of playing with adults when I was a child. I think most adults would enjoy playing with children, at least occasionally, if they stopped thinking of it as an obligation, or as a teaching opportunity, or as an activity in which they are supposed to subordinate themselves to the child. The way to think about it is this. What play activity might be fun for you and for your child?

I can’t answer that question for you, but here are some thoughts pertaining to me. I would never want to play barbies or anything like it. I get very quickly bored with hide and seek. I don’t like Candy Land or other such little kid board games. But I can have great fun being a monster chasing a child around pretending I’m going to catch her and eat her for dinner, and most children (who know me) get a great kick out of that too

I’m getting a little old for it now, but I used to enjoy getting down of the floor and swinging little kids up on my legs, sometimes tossing them over my head onto soft cushions behind me. The kids would laugh and scream and ask for more. Similarly, I used to love giving piggyback rides, romping around the yard. In short, rough and tumble (perhaps better called gentle and tumble when it’s with little kids) can be great fun for most kids and for at least some adults. Of course, as in all play, you must keep attuned to your playmates’ experiences. Are they screaming in joy or in fear? Admittedly, this kind of play seems to appeal to dads more than to moms, but I’ve found that little girls love it at least as much as do little boys and I’ve seen some moms really enjoy it too.

As children get a little older, they can play and enjoy board games or card games that are fun for adults too. These generally are games that involve some degree of strategy but also a good deal of luck, so anyone who can master at least some of the strategy can win. In the family I grew up in, we played lots of games that fell into that category, such as canasta, hearts, poker, and monopoly. My youngest brothers were already pretty good at these games by the time they were five or six, and we sometimes had game nights that helped unite us as a family.

I also remember—both as a child and as a parent years ago—very much enjoying games of softball or touch football that involved everyone from little kids to grandparents. These might take place at gatherings of the extended family, or at labor union picnics (when I was a kid) or holiday festivals. The players might range in age from five up to seventy-five, and everyone played in ways that fit their capacities.

Our Real Obligation Regarding Our Children’s Play

As a child I would never have wanted play with adults to be my most regular play. The bread and butter of play, or for the sake of metaphor the “cake” of play, must be with other children. But occasional play with adults, when the adults are truly playing and not condescending, can be special. It can be the icing on the cake, but too much icing becomes sickening.

Our real obligation regarding our children’s play is not to be their playmates but to figure out ways, in this isolating world we have created, to bring our children into free, regular, prolonged contact with other children, where we can let them be, so they can make friends and play in all the ways that children, but not adults, are designed to play. In my next letter I’ll suggest some ways we might do that.

Final Thoughts

What are your experiences of playing with children or your memories of playing with adults when you were a child? You can add to the value of this letter by adding your own thoughts, experiences, and questions.

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References

Lancy, D. (2007). Accounting for variability in mother-child play. American Anthropologist, 109, 273-284.

Scheidecker, G. (2023). Parents, caregivers, and peers: Patterns of complementarity in the social world of children in rural Madagascar. Current Anthropology, 64 #3.