Playful Parenting | Lawrence J. Cohen | What do you know? Goofiness is a skill.

Playful Parenting | Lawrence J. Cohen | Great

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Playful Parenting

	Playful Parenting Lawrence J. Cohen Ballantine Books, 2002 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What do you know? Goofiness is a skill.

This is a great book that I encourage parents to read. Dr. Cohen certainly didn't invent this approach, and I don't believe he's claiming to have, but he does a great job of making the case for the importance of playing with your children. And not just taking the time to play with your children, but also approaching discipline and parenting in a playful manner.

This is all easier said than done. The technique is fairly simple in its basic form: sitting on the floor, parent and child one-on-one, and play, letting the child take the lead and shape the direction of the play. But this really is a luxury for most families these days. Parents are busy and stressed. Some days, getting everyone where they need to go, putting food on the table, and keeping your kids safe is about all that can be asked. But the payoffs are worth it in terms of deepening the connection with your child, teaching confidence, and laughing together. It can also be therapeutic for the parents, as you observe what kind of fantasies or strong feelings are tough for you to tolerate. When is it tough for us adults to give up our dignity and play dumb, play powerless. When we re-direct, is it for our children's sake or to spare us from our own anxiety and frustrations. It's rich stuff.

Children play because it's fun. But it is also a child's way of learning, experimenting, playing with different roles, and communicating. Play is also a way of being close, so playing with your child helps bonding, filling that insatiable need for attachment and affection. A third purpose of play is to process and recover from painful experiences and emotional distress. Dr. Cohen gives the simple example of a little kid coming back from a doctor's visit and wanting to pretend they are a doctor and their parents are the patients who have to get shots. This phenomenon, mastering anxiety or painful emotions through play, takes different forms at different developmental stages, with a common adolescent example being the kid who gets bullied at school and goes home to play a video game in which they shoot and kill people.

I think it's easy to think of degrees of playfulness that are aspects of your personality, something inherent in some people and not in others. But you can actually learn it, and the examples in the book give nice illustrations of how to approach playful parenting. It's just a technique, it's an attitude, and one that immediately makes a difference if put to practice. It's focusing away from rules and instead teaching principles. It's entering the child's world, not worrying about the specific behaviors as much as trying to appreciate what the behavior is communicating. As Dr. Cohen says, "our children want us and need us to loosen up." An important part of this is getting down on the floor, literally, and looking at the world from the point of view of children. It is remembering what it felt like to be a little person walking around in a world full of these giant adults, grown-ups who rush around obsessed with the boring details of rules.

I've been fortunate to have this kind of playfulness modeled for me at my children's pre-school. I've described the preschool to friends, it is a co-op school, and they've joking labeled it `hippie pre-school.' I, myself, was calling it a free-range school. But I wasn't fully on board in the beginning. It seemed too unstructured. The kids were running around playing, doing what they want. It wasn't at all like other preschools I had visited, which operate more like obedience school for kids. I worried that, the kids are having fun but they aren't being taught anything. And then I finally got it. There's plenty of time in childhood later to sit in chairs and be a passive learner, plenty of time to learn your ABC's and math in the grade school years. The important tasks of preschool really should be social learning, learning to interact with other kids, learning to interact with adults who are parents or teachers, and nurturing the spontaneous creative play the comes naturally for all us until it has to be squelched, unlearned in the later grades.

I could go on and on, there are chapters in the book dealing with more specific situations that parents struggle with, discipline issues, sibling rivalries, safety issues, setting limits... all that stuff. Just a great book that provides a different perspective on parenting, explained in a way that- while appreciating the realities of our daily lives- when put into practice is refreshing and helpful for parents and children. It's also a lot of fun.

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Great

There's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said so I'll simply add my name to the names of all the people who know this is a great parenting book.

Excellent book!

Great for the "serious" parent. I great way to connect with your child on their level.

A great Book about Connecting with your kids through play

In this fast paced life we lead it is easy to become disconnected from our children in so many ways. I found this book extrememly helpful for connecting with my kids through play. Cohen used personal examples that were interesting as well as gave play by play instruction for those of us who have forgotten how to "get down on the floor" and enjoy the things our kids enjoy. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their relationships with their children.

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Could be better