I Don’t Play With My Kids

Less negligent, more European!

Play—no adult required!

A woman I know, a stepmother, asked me how much time I spend playing with my kids each day.

“None,” I answered.

She was visibly horrified by my answer. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t really play with my kids at all,” I said. “I’m around, but they do their own thing, and I do mine.”

She told me she spends an hour or two playing actively each day after work. She seemed a bit worn out by it, but assumed this was a requirement of child-raising.

“It’s not,” I told her. “If you love it, do it! But you don’t have to.”

Based on how much I shocked her, I wouldn’t be surprised if she now thinks I’m a terrible parent and that my children are on track for future delinquency. But it raised an interesting point that I’ve been considering ever since.

The Demands of ‘Fun Morality’

It seems that, in recent decades, the role of parent has expanded to include the role of personal entertainer. It’s assumed that parents are not only responsible for their child’s physical and emotional well-being, education, socialization, language development, and more, but that they will also rescue the child from boredom and serve as a live-in, on-demand playmate whenever the child wants it.

Back in the 1950s, sociologist Martha Wolfenstein described a new “fun morality,” where the idea of entertaining children and preventing boredom became a new parental responsibility. Quoting Wolfenstein, author Kim Brooks pointed out in Small Animals that, paradoxically, the rise of fun morality coincided with a widespread geographical shift to suburbia and the rise of car culture, which made things even harder for already-stretched parents:

“Just as experts were warning parents of the dangers of child boredom and lack of attention, many families were moving to suburban homes, where ‘yards were often isolated, limiting the capacity of children to join in the kind of spontaneous cohorts that had earlier formed in small-town America.’ The result of this was a parenting culture and experience more demanding than ever before.”

Adults playing with children for extended periods of time on a regular basis is not a natural state. It may be fun for a few spontaneous minutes here and there, but not for a significant chunk of every day. Some people may truly love it (and that’s great, if so), but many parents I’ve spoken to share my sense that it’s mind-numbingly boring.

You Can Do Your Own Thing

I realized this from a young age. I used to do a lot of babysitting, and after hours of engaging directly with children in their various games of dress-up or hide-and-seek or Lego-building, I remember thinking, “I can never be a parent. This would drive me absolutely crazy.” What I didn’t realize is that parenting doesn’t have to be like that.

When you’re a parent, you can fill the long hours by simply going about your day—doing chores, cooking food, doing yard work, running errands, walking places, playing music, visiting with friends, even reading a book outside—and your child tags along. They are entertained by watching and absorbing what’s happening around them. This happens far more naturally when you’re not being paid by the hour to “watch” someone else’s kid.

When left to their own devices, children will inevitably get caught up in games of their own, particularly as they reach toddlerhood and beyond. (Babies do require more active, hands-on play, showing them how to do things.) In fact, children need time and space away from their parents to create imaginary worlds. Too rarely are they afforded “the luxury of being unnoticed, of being left alone,” as described by Mona Simpson.

This is what true free play is—a creative realm apart from adults. Adults do children a disservice by constantly inserting themselves (and their logical, questioning brains) into children’s play. I suspect adult presence impedes many kids’ imaginations from running wild because they may feel self-conscious about what they’re proposing. I wouldn’t be surprised if children’s play took on an artificial, performative aspect in the presence of adults.

You Don’t Have to Do It All

Many authors, from Judith Warner to Pamela Druckerman to Sara Zaske and many others, have famously described the cultural parenting differences between Europe and North America. To play up a stereotype, French mothers sip wine as their children play nearby, whereas American moms climb the playground equipment to satisfy their child’s request for participation.

And yet, as Warner pointed out in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, this represents a “breakdown of boundaries between children and adults, and the erosion for many families of any notion of adult time and space.” No one is ever on their own anymore. It's enough to make any parent feel extraordinarily stressed.

I don’t need a book to tell me which of those parenting models, European vs. North American, is more appealing. Not everyone will share my feelings, but I have always felt deeply uncomfortable when participating in children’s games; I prefer to be on the sidelines, a “lifeguard parent”, if you will, usually reading a book and drinking tea unless an emergency requires intervention. I used to feel guilty about this, wondering if there was something wrong with me for not wanting to play “trains” or “dolls” or build blanket forts on repeat, but that dissipated years ago.

I have no problem drawing that line now. When my kids ask me to play, I almost always say no, unless they want to wrestle, which I love, or if they want to do active things, like hiking and biking and swimming. But usually, I tell them:

“My job is to feed you, clothe you, buy toys for you, socialize you, make sure you do well in school, get enough sleep, take you outside, plan family adventures, learn manners, make friends, listen to you and advise you, ensure you’re fit and healthy. I can’t add ‘play with you’ to that list. I’m maxed out. That’s why I gave you siblings!”

I say it kindly, of course, but they get the point. I am their mother, not their playmate. Those are two very different things, and I just can’t do it all.

You Might Also Like:

• Screen-Free Road Trips

• Designing for Offline Play

• Yes, Please Talk to My Kid!

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A Small Reminder:

I am able to write this newsletter twice a week, thanks to generous readers who enjoy my words enough to sign up for a paid subscription! Substack is not exactly a money-maker, but every bit helps—perhaps most of all by validating my belief that I’m on the right track with this quest to reclaim childhood from digital devices. My dream is for this newsletter to become a full-time job someday.

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