Do you want to know why is play important in the parent-child relationship? I'm Nicholeen Peck and
I teach parenting, good communication and child development all over the world through the lens
of self-government and in this video I'm going to be talking about play and why it's so important.
In this video I'm going to be sharing one of the stories from my life that has a special place in
my heart because it changed who I was as a mom and I'm going to be talking to you about what
you can do to increase play and bonding with your child. Shortly after I had my second baby and I
remember we were living in a new house at the time, I was nursing the baby and rocking the baby in the
rocking chair in her room and I looked outside to see my little child who was probably two and
a half years old sitting out in the dirt and he was playing with his tractors. He loved tractors
and we had a lot of dirt at the time because our landscaping wasn't done yet on our property. But he
was sitting there close to the house nestled under one of the little parts of the house that would
jut out so that he was sheltered from any wind and he was just driving his tractors and playing
with his tractors and he was all by himself and suddenly my heart felt this little pang.
Where is his friend, I thought? He needs to play with someone, he needs to laugh with
someone but here we lived in this cul-de-sac by ourselves. There were no other children around
that he could play with at that time and I had a sibling for him but she was a baby
and so she couldn't go out in the dirt and play tractors and suddenly it hit me. I'm the friend.
I'm the one who's supposed to play with him. Obviously I can't do it all the time. He's going
to have to learn sometimes that he doesn't get to have a friend with him and clearly he's doing that
and I should be happy. I should be proud of him he can play on his own but it made my heart hurt.
It made my heart want to be out there with him and I think it's because before this baby came,
we had played and played and played and I'd never thought about the fact that there could come a
time when he wouldn't have someone to play with. Obviously children shouldn't have a friend every
single second of the day and someone to entertain them every second. He was learning a good skill but
I made a decision that day. I decided that I needed to remember that I was supposed to play
with my children, that I needed to find the time to do it. So, I put the baby in her bed because she had
fallen asleep and I put on my shoes and instead of doing dishes or laundry or something else that
I knew needed to get done and this was my moment because he was busily engaged with his tractors,
instead I went out there and I crawled under that little overhang in the house and I started
playing tractors with him and why did I do this? Because my mother had done the same thing for me
at a key time in my life. My mother in order to earn extra money because my dad was a public
school teacher, he did not make much money. So in order to earn extra money, she did babysitting in
our home. And so oftentimes I would come home from school and there were lots of other children there
and she had to take care of all of them and so oftentimes I would just play by myself. Well one
day I went into my room and I was playing with my dolls and suddenly there was my mom at the doorway
and she looked at me and she said Nicholeen, can I play with you? Little did she know
that playing with her was what I wanted more than anything else. She was never available for
me because there were always people that needed her and it was like she knew that I was thinking
I don't like playing alone. I wish I could play with my mom and she came at that moment and
she asked if she could play with me and we had probably 20 blissful minutes of playing together.
At that moment I decided that was the mom I wanted to be, that 20 minutes of my mom was who I wanted
to become and that's why I knew I needed to go out in the dirt that day with my son. Play is so very
important in the relationship between parent and child. Parents actually teach their children how to
play. They teach their children to like playing, they teach their children that they can invent
things instead of just having to be entertained all of the time. They open the door to possibility
when they play with their children. My children were all imaginative and they were the children
that so many other children in the neighborhood wanted to play with and do things with
and it's because they could create while they played because that's what I did when I played
with them. I taught them how to do it so that's one really valuable thing that comes from playing with
mom and dad. They learn the better ways to play right but also playing with your children teaches
your child how to bond with other people and this is probably one of the most important lessons
they'll ever learn. I want to talk about key things you can do to improve your bonding with your child
through play and something else that might surprise you but first, click that subscribe
button now. There are so many great videos on this channel that will lead toward better
communication, better relationship and better child development and I don't want you to miss any of
them so click subscribe now and don't forget to also hit that notification bell so that you
are notified when new great videos come out. The most basic need that a person has is bonding. In
fact it is lesson number one if a person can bond with their parents, their family members
then they can start learning other things they can learn how to solve problems, they can learn
academic things. They can learn social lessons but it is the bonding that happens very first.
Just because it happens first when someone is a baby does not mean that we ever end needing to
increase our bonding. We don't. We all need bonding all the time, it's one of the things that helps us
socially thrive. In fact we get very bound up emotionally if we don't feel proper bonds with
people. The parent-child bond is the most vital of all bonds. Children want to know that they belong
to their parents. They want to know that they belong in a family, that sense of belonging
leads to security that they will have forever. You cannot give a person esteem or security
but you can bond to them, which will ultimately lead to the security that they are looking for.
So parents have to always be on their game when it comes to bonding and play is one of those vital
times that we get to bond with our children that we can talk about things besides their behaviors
or their homework or the things that we want them to do, their chores. Instead we can talk about
something completely different. We can open up the world and open up those doors to communication
by choosing to deliberately play with our children and bond with them through that experience. Now
remember I told you there was a little bit of a surprise coming that play is not the only way that
we bond with our children. In fact work is a vital bonding mechanism for relationships as well. When
you work with people, you bond with people. This is actually something that many people forget. They
just focus on leisure or play and they leave the work to somebody else but I promise you working
alongside someone can sometimes even increase the bonding more than play. For children, play is their
work. They are learning and growing and developing new skills through all of that play so it is
their work. So over time when play just becomes more leisure and it's not as much of a learning
experience, we've got to bring in work. We've got to work with our children so that we can continue to
have those deep bonding times where you problem solve together, you talk about how you learned
those particular skills from your life and that when you remember working alongside your parents
too, what you gained from that, that work and that play lead to identity development for the child,
that's big. In fact that's almost everything for the child. If they know who they are, where they
came from and they know the people they're bonded to and who always love them and care about them,
then they can have security for life no matter what. They don't have to invent up some new thing
for their identity. Instead they can just be very confident in who they already are, those
self-evident truths about themselves. So parents, there's a lot riding on that, that means you've
got to take the time to do the work. You've got to take the time to do the play, you've got to set it
aside as a top priority. This is why I encourage family activities on a weekly basis that parents
will deliberately set up family activity time so that they have deliberate time to work on bonding
together as a family. There's also meetings which are problem solving times that you can work on
with your family as well. These are times where you check up on how your relationship is doing
and how the bond is doing. There's family meetings, couples meetings, individual mentor meetings with
the children where you can talk openly about your relationships and make plans for the future.
This is also going to be something that helps pave the way for a good, open and trusting relationship
in the future. Not only does playing with your child help with creativity and bonding but it
helps with problem-solving abilities. If there is one thing parents keep bringing up to me again and
again, it's that they are noticing that children are not doing good at solving problems, that people
are getting overwhelmed and anxious all the time. If they just have one problem, they start to shut
down. Well problem solving is something that is trained and it is trained through play and through
work. If a parent wants their child to be very good at problem solving then they need to work
and play alongside them more. This will help the child learn how to solve the problems that they
might face in the future that they don't even know about yet. Patterns of problem solving are
developed when we are young and if they are not, if a person is just entertained or someone solves
all of their problems for them then that child becomes handicapped in the future. So playing with
your children and working with your children is just one component to creating a family culture
or environment where that child develops into a strong person, not just physically strong but
emotionally strong and bonded. When your child knows how to bond with the other people around
them, that gives them security and strength for life. If you've liked this video, I know you're
going to love my next video which is called how to solve communication problems in a relationship.
In that video you will learn some key strategies for solving some of your communication problems
with your child. Click on the link to that video now and I'll see you there.