Set a Timer for 20 Minutes to Play With Your Child
There is a certain scenario that my son enjoyed playing with me when he was four years old. We made a house, train and ticket office from Lego Duplo blocks. The guide came into the house, took the guy and his Dalmatia and took them to the dinosaur museum, where the real dinosaurs actually lived, and it looked pretty intimidating, except that the dinosaurs were always pretty reassuring that they weren’t going to eat dinosaurs. guy or his dog.
I played with the voice of a dog, of course. So everything I said was before and after the “ruff-ruff”. Like, “Ruff, oh no, I think it’s a Giganotosaurus, ruff!”
It was totally funny the first time we played it four times. By the 83rd round, he had lost much of his appeal to me.
I’ve never been a huge fan of RPGs. Give me a stack of board games, some crayons, or a trampoline and I’ll be ready. Feed me endless courses of fake plastic food and I want to crawl into the hole. It seemed that the scenarios could drag on and on and on, no end in sight.
I wish I had read this Slate article back then , because it could have given me the perfect way to balance my son’s need for repetition of the game and my need not to be stuck in the land of dinosaur museums forever:
Give them pure attention for a while, dropping everything else and doing whatever they want. At first glance, this sounds cumbersome, but in practice it really frees you: you put the phone down (everyone agrees that it is necessary), stop thinking about cooking dinner and for a while just float through the waves of a child’s whim, seeing that a child does.
I could set a timer. Twenty minutes once a day to imagine damn Lego. If we had only 20 minutes, perhaps I would challenge myself to see how many “ruffs” I can collect (100-1000 ??) or how many dinosaurs we can almost be attacked.
Twenty minutes is not a hard and fast rule
I just picked a number. Maybe you only have 15 minutes of pretending to eat plastic food. Maybe you want to break it down into two tens – 10 minutes in the morning and 10 in the afternoon or evening. Or maybe you have 30 minutes! The amount of time is less important than the deliberate allocation of time for games and socializing.
Put your phone away
Take it away. Put it on a shelf, put it in a drawer, put it in another room. (Don’t put it in your back pocket, it’s too tempting.) They will notice that they have fully focused your attention and you will feel less guilty about all the other distractions during the day.
Think of it as quality time.
You certainly don’t want your child to feel like those 20 minutes are just another chore that you have to do every day. Delighted: “Oooh, the game time is 20 minutes!” can go a long way in making your child feel like pleasure for both of you, a welcome break from an otherwise stressful day.