Today we’ll take a look at some of the real anxiety producing experiences kids face. Sometimes it’s hard for adults to relate to why these would be scary…like getting a haircut, for example. When anyone faces the unknown, their brain doesn’t like it and will quickly attempt to fill in those blanks from their catalog of experiences.
Sometimes I wish I had an indicator I could see that would give me a warning when I need to pause and recharge. As a parent, caregiver, teacher or whatever your role is with kids it can be easy to get burned out. I’d like to show you a tool I use for myself and the families I work with to help monitor this and to figure out what needs to happen to get back on track and those batteries fully charged again.
Have you ever been called in to your boss’s office? What about the principals office, when you were a kid? Or how about someone you care about saying the dreaded words “we need to talk”?
How does that feel? How much are you able to listen?
This is how your kids feel when you try to parent or discipline using intensity.
One of the reasons I emphasize fun so much, is that when families get stressed out and stop having fun, they also stop connecting and tend to retreat into their separate corners. That leads to more stress and heightens other issues (depression anxiety, etc) which circles around and causes more disconnectedness and more stress. Having fun together as a family can break this cycle and give you resilience against stress.
So many of us are stuck at home with kids who feel bored, frustrated and anxious during this pandemic. What do we do?
Your family survival kit may contain toilet paper, hand sanitizer and masks…but are you saving any room for having fun? This version of a family survival kit is focused on strengthening connections and helping families thrive by building resiliency through our activities together. Rather than let the coronavirus squeeze us into an unrecognizable shape, we’re pushing back and deciding to make our families a great place to be, even in the midst of a pandemic. Thanks for going on this journey with me!
Let’s start with a foundational fun activity…let’s build a fort!
You might need a fort for each member of your family to get some space from each other by the end of a day! They can also be a great gathering place for the family to reconnect or band together.
Just in case you need to make an academic argument for it…here’s some other benefits:
It fosters maturity, independence, and confidence.
Increases cognitive skills, problem solving, planning, and imagination!
If building together it increases social skills, like cooperating and negotiating.
Practical skills; it’s like taking a construction 101 class!
Lots of exercise, from all that building and play!
Stress-release: A fort is, literally and figuratively, a defense against all the forces of the outside world (and one of the best for daydreaming).
I spend a lot of days getting put in jail, pretending to negotiate standoffs, battling monsters and villains. This is all part of kids processing feelings and experiences of anger, revenge, powerlessness (or figuring out how to be powerful). Does aggressive play mean kids will become more aggressive? How can you tell if it’s going too far? Should you let them do it?
Here’s my latest video helping to unpack what kinds of things happen in kids’ play.
Photo by Lavi Perchik on Unsplash
Have you ever seen those ads that say things like “If you do this ONE thing, you’ll get rid of all your debt” or “you’ll lose all your belly fat” or whatever other not likely scenario someone is peddling? Well, let me give you another one that sounds unlikely but actually works…having fun with your family can change everything about it! Research shows that it can:
Increase the resilience and resistance to stress (helps disarm the power of stressors and temptations to turn to harmful things)
Create relational safety and security (which makes everyone want to connect and share about their thoughts, feelings and needs)
Transmits the values you’re trying to establish
Teaches healthy boundaries and how to make relationship repairs
Helps process and heal the results of stress and trauma
However, it comes at a high price. You will not find the time to do this. If you want the reward, you’ll have to give up something to create the time. But I can’t imagine you’ll regret it. At the end of my life, there will be many extra work hours, meetings, seminars and events that I will never remember. I’ll bet I would trade almost any of them for an extra hour to play with my kids…
Check out my latest video on this and see where you can begin this journey!
There is so much going on in play! It has tremendous power to heal, activate regions of the brain and show someone's worldview. Plato said “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation.” Fred Rogers said "Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood." This is what drew me to become a Play Therapist.
