Learning to play with your children when you never learned to play as child yourself.

I love Patrick Gray, the psychologist and research professor at Boston College, who is into Unschooling and writes a column for Psychology Today and has written a book entitled, Free To Learn.

His latest column published on Psychology Today on 09/06/14 is entitled, "Playing with Children: Should You, and If So, How?" You can access it by clicking here.

I am 68 years old and my wife and I had 9 children and I have been a Psychiatric Social Worker and Family Counselor for over 45 years. You'd think I'd know something about the topic, but I am not the most playful guy except there are times when I like to get silly and kid around. My ex-wife used to say to me all the time, "You're not as funny as you think you are," to which I would always reply, "Yes, I am," and she'd shout at me getting angrier, "No you're not!" and now that we are divorced I can tell you that I realize that she suffered from what is called Borderline Personality Disorder and could fly into a Borderline rage, and let me tell you that was not funny with stuff getting broken, screaming, and then a sulking retreat which sometimes could go on for 3 or 4 days.

So, I got my playfulness dampened down often thinking that discretion is the better part of valor and it is better to simmer down, take a low profile, and act serious. The kids also were on their guard often not wanting to upset mom and playfulness was directly related to whether mom was in a good mood or bad mood. People who have grown up in alcoholic families and/or families with other dysfunction also have learned not to trust playfulness especially between parent and child because there is too much fear that the parent can get out of control. So, unfortunately, children learn in dysfunctional families that it's not okay to play with adults because they can't be trusted and will wind up hurting you. In these situations it becomes a challenging adult task to learn how to play and I won't say "learn how to play again" because they never learned how to play in the first place.

When these people who grew up in dysfunctional families who couldn't play with their parents or other adults as children, they don't know how now, as parents, to play with their own children. It's painful, awkward, scarey, and extremely anxiety provoking and difficult if it can be done at all. Gray's article isn't addressing these situations. He is addressing some general thoughts for the more well adjusted parents and children.

Read Gray's article. It's brief and he covers the basics. If I had to add a few thoughts of my own it would be these:

Kids learn best through play. All kinds of things. But the most important are emotional management skills and interpersonal interactive skills.

Connecting with a child can be more therapeutic and life giving for the adult than it is for the child.

As Gray says, "let the child lead" and don't dominate the child, but also be alert to enforcing good boundaries and rules.

Jesus says that unless we become like little children again we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What did He mean? I think He meant we have to lose our sense of a separate egotistical self and become one with everything, become one with the all, go with the flow. No one can do this better than an innocent child at play for whom time has no meaning. Perhaps we can lose ourselves in that world of play as well if we allow ourselves to overcome our self-consciousness and shed the dysfunctional conditioning of our past.