Play that solves power struggles with Patty Wipfler

0:02 Hi, I'm Patty Wipfler, I'm the founder of Hand in Hand parenting, and Hand in Hand is here to really do our best to help you as a mom or a dad enjoy parenting, more fully connect really well with your child and support your child as a growing, thinking, loving cooperative person. Our listening tools actually do that, they give you a way to build support for yourself

0:39 because parenting is an emotionally wearing job and to give you the tools to really connect with your child and to cooperate with your child's inborn process of offloading feelings from the hard times he or she has so that your child can think better, feel closer to you, feel backed and loved  and cared about more of the time. We can't help our children feel perfectly wonderful all the minutes of every day

1:15 but we can learn how to repair that feeling, how to plump it up and how to help our child move forward with some of the issues that arise for them as they grow and learn, and that's what we're here to do. Today I want to talk about the fifth listening tool that I've talked about in these little videos, it's called Playlisting ; now what Playlisting is is just like the frosting on the cake of play.

1:51 Play is really wonderful for children, it's very, very good for them, it is an essential need for children to play, it is how they learn the world and it's also how they show us how they feel, what their issues are, what things have happened to them they're still wrestling with and it's a vehicle for them showing us what's on their mind, what they're trying to figure out, what they want us to know about them, and play is that kind of vehicle,

2:30 but Playlisting is this part of play in which children have a laugh or a chuckle or their eyes brighten up and it's learning how to move play from that very interesting kind of high point to a place where a child can laugh and to where you can support that laughter and help it come again and again so that the play releases a child's fears and releases a child's embarrassment.

3:01 I once visited a child down the street from us who I didn't know well, I didn't know the mom well so I made a time and went over and said hello, and so I'm sitting in the living room talking with mom and we're just getting to know each other and the daughter is down the hall, she can see me in the living room and I just look over and I go "Hi there", and she starts laughing and coming toward me,  she runs towards me, laughing, laughing, laughing

3:31 laughing, laughing and climbs right into my lap  and looks into my eyes and I'm looking at her and she's laughing and laughing and laughing, it's like the way she could get close to me, the way she could dare to do that was to laugh all the way so that she's offloading embarrassment every second, and then she is brave enough to step climb into my lap and I'm somebody she doesn't know, and brave enough to look me in the eye but the way she's brave enough is to laugh and laugh and laugh.

4:04 That's how children offload embarrassment, but it also offloads fears. So children invent games in which they are brave and strong and you are the one that can't figure things out, you are the one that doesn't know what's going on, you're the one that can't win and that allows children to offload the fears that come from being a learner in this world and knowing so little

4:35 and having to fail a hundred times, a thousand times before you can walk, you have to fail another thousand times before you can say a sentence and all those failures are hard on kids, they don't show it because they're determined to move forward, but it's hard on children, little by little it undermines their confidence in themselves and laughter allows them to work through those fears to get rid of those fears and to recover their confidence that they are capable, strong,

5:08 big enough for the world, big enough to figure things out even though they're still small. And that's what you want from Playlistening. First of all, you want the delight that comes when  your child is laughing and you are promoting the laughter, it's like they are delighted, they're having a high time of it, they are feeling their best and you see them in that state and you are  feeling like a wonderful dad or a wonderful mom to be able to keep that going and as the two of you connect with the laughter rolling,

5:42 your relationship gets stronger and your child feels safer and safer and more and more thrilled that you are their mom, you are their dad; it's really just a wonderful tool. It takes some creativity and most of us have had parents who were working too hard or were too stressed or had too many children to be able to do very much play, and so the whole idea of playing extensively feels  a little daunting and is a little daunting,

6:17 so we have this other tool listening partnerships  which I've talked about here to help you work through how hard it is to even think about playing most of the time and as you work through whatever feelings you have there, whatever memories of a play-starved childhood you might have, your ability to take things more lightly, your ability to just join and play without knowing where it's going or what's going to happen next will increase and your child be able to enjoy those times more and more fully with you.

6:51 So you can use one tool to help the other tool along. Let's see... I want to say that there are sort of three big adult promoted biases against the value of play and I just want to outline these very briefly. The first one is that play is childish, and yes, play is childish because children are brave enough to experiment, they are brave enough to do something without knowing how it's going to turn out,

7:23 they're brave enough to try something over and over again, they're brave enough to believe that they are Superman and have super powers, brave enough to believe that they are Wonder Woman, all of those kinds of bravery allow children  to experiment very, very fully and to try things again and again, and this is their power as human beings, is the speed with which they learn because they're brave enough to try and it would be good in our world if play continued to be childish,

7:55 and play also became adultish if we could play more, experiment more and just be brave enough to just throw ourselves in without knowing how things are going to turn out, we would learn a lot faster and a lot more efficiently. So yes, play is childish but that's not a criticism, that's a fine attribute of play. Another one is play is a waste of time and I guess what I can say to that is that Albert Einstein said that play is the highest form of research

8:33 and coming from one of the best minds in probably three centuries, I think we could maybe question that idea that this is just a waste of time, they're just pretending what good is that. What's happening is that children are experimenting very fully, they're learning the world with their bodies, with their minds, by tasting things and smelling things and watching what happens, and this is exactly what learning is and they're  out there doing it as much as they can.

9:09 I think the third thing is that nothing happens in play, it's like: "What's happening here? This is just building a thing out of blocks that's going to fall down, who cares..." and I guess my view of it having worked with  children for a long time is everything happens in play, you get to know your child through play and when you bring an open mind, when you bring attentiveness, when you bring interest and when you see play as a vehicle for showing you what's going on inside of your child,

9:45 you can learn a whole lot and it may take a while for your child to trust you to play things that reveal more and more about herself or himself, but the play will be revelatory if you have the mind to receive the information, to receive the code that they are showing you in. So be on the lookout for how your child looks, how they express themselves, what issues come up in play, what role they ask you to play, all of that is telling you something about them

10:19 and if you don't know what it's telling you, just think about it in listening time so that you can explore what you are being shown and really try to see into it see into your child through the play that they do with you. How you get Playlistening going is to find - first of all be a detective, take maybe three days or a week and just  see and write down the times your child laughs and what is going on, who are they with,  what's happening,

10:52 how does the laughter keep going or does it just one little chuckle and then no more laughter? Is your child in connection with you or with someone else? Which person do they laugh the most with? Why do you suppose that is? Lots of things to explore there, so be a detective first, then get a little closer when they are having a playful time with laughter and see if you can keep the same thing or something similar happening

11:22 so they can laugh more, even if it stretches your idea of what is proper play, the play that exudes the most laughter is usually highly improper and you're going to have to let go of your assumptions about propriety and just let things flow in order to be able to support your child to release fear and for you to take the less powerful role. And then, slowly but surely experiment with taking the less powerful role, let's see...

11:54 I'm going to tell you a little story happened a long time ago: a dad I know who was doing Special Time with his child on a regular basis and that was going well, his child was maybe four, he had a whole bunch of work to do for about  three weeks and he couldn't do Special Time, so finally he says to his daughter "Zahara, this  Saturday, we're going to do Special Time, we're going to do special time for 20 minutes okay? Think of what you want to do and we'll do it."

12:24 So Saturday morning comes along and he looks at Zahara: "What do you want to do sweetie?" "Daddy I want to jump off the dining room table", he goes "Well okay, I got to put a blanket on the table so we don't scratch it. Where do you want to jump?" "Daddy down there" and she just points to the carpet and so he goes "Well okay" and she jumps off the table and has a little giggle and then climbs back on the table again

12:49 and jumps off and he's like wondering what he's supposed to be doing and all of this happens a few times and then she looks at him and says "Daddy say 'no no', and that's his clue, it's like there is a way that he  can play the less powerful role and she's figured out what it is, so he doesn't know quite how to say 'no no' what what exactly the point is, but he goes "No, no Zohara, don't jump" and she looks at him and she jumps off and laughs and laughs and laughs.

13:20 and trots back up and then it's a game, and it's a it's a laughter game, and he tried different kinds of no-no and what  he came up with that made her laugh the most was: "Zahara you'll hurt yourself, oh please don't  jump, please don't jump Zahara!" and she would just laugh and laugh and laugh before she jumped and that she'd laughed when she landed all fine and good, and just this game went on for 20 minutes and they played this I think two or three different Saturdays

13:50 and her dad didn't know what the heck this is about, all he knew was that she loved this game and she couldn't wait to play it to have him be  scared that she might hurt herself and to have her be the one who jumps and survives over and over, and then came a fourth Saturday, and her aunt came and visited and the whole family went down to the neighborhood park together with the aunt, and Zahara runs to this very large sort of twisty slide, it had a very high ladder and she had never ever ever been up,

14:29 even one rung of that ladder and her dad six months ago had tried to like urge her to try it and she was like hanging on for dear life to the rails at the bottom "No, no don't make me do it", and crying and crying, she absolutely refused  to try that ladder and after these three Saturdays of jumping off the living room table and having her dad go "No no please, don't jump", she go runs over to the slide, runs up the ladder, sits at the top, wiggles her bottom and goes daddy say "No, no",

15:08 and down she goes, it's like that and what was funny was that as she's climbing the ladder, the aunt is going "No Zahara, it's too high". So anyway she was scaring her aunt but her daddy knew what to do and she was full of confidence to do something that she had screamed bloody murder that she would never do six months ago and so that play was intentional, she somehow had something in mind consciously or unconsciously and Playlistening released the fears

15:45 so that her world  was bigger and she was more sure of herself and she could do stuff she never thought she could do. So that's play listening, just one example and... where did I put my Listen... This is the book that has lots and lots of  examples of Playlistening and how it solves children's fears, children's issues around not doing what needs to be done. It is a wonderful tool, you will feel like a genius when you find interesting and creative ways to play the less powerful role,

16:18 get your child laughing and then watch the transformation that comes; sometimes it comes quickly, sometimes it can take a whole lot of Playlistening before you see much change, depending on how deep your child's fears go, but there's a story in there about a child, a little two-year-old, overcoming the terror  of being stung by seven yellow jackets at the same time that made it so scary for him that he wouldn't even go outside after this had happened,

16:47 in the middle of a hot summer in Boston, he would not go outside and have his mom solved this by doing Playlistening with him and also Staylistening. There's another story in there about - let's see - oh about a boy who has a significant part in a school play but the day before the play is supposed to  happen, he's like "I'm not going, it's a stupid play, I don't like it, I think the play stinks and I'm not going to be part of it",

17:20 and what his dad does to get Playlistening going so that his son can laugh and laugh and laugh the night before and then how it all just resolved in the morning and he did a great job in the play; and how a mother used Playlistening on her son's nail biting which was chronic, he'd been biting his nails for ages and it was bothering her, she used a couple of other tools too to loosen things up for herself with listening partnerships

17:50 and I think she used setting limits in there too but mostly it was Playlistening, and it was genius, it's really really good um and there are other stories about using Playlistening to lighten the load on homework woes, to help children's minds come back up out of the muck around homework because their parents are willing to get in and  get laughter going to lighten their mood and the whole family and then a child can  think well enough to do what needs to be done

18:24 and not mind it at all. So it's a powerful tool, not the easiest of tools for most of us, but there's lots of examples in the Listen book that will keep you experimenting, keep you moving forward, keep you becoming the one who has the wisdom and the creativity to find good ways to get laughter going in your family, making everybody closer and giving everybody a more fun time out of every day.

18:55 So enjoy this tool and we're so glad to have you with us, keep coming back, we've got so much resource to share with you to try to give you a chance to enjoy your parenting more and really see the genius in your children every day.