Episode 149: How to Build Kid's Resilience with Structured Play w/ Dr. Deborah Gilboa
/We are now halfway through our 30 Days of Play Challenge. For the past few weeks, we've talked about unstructured, independent play and its wonderful advantages it has for kids. Today, I want to give you a full well-rounded picture of how play can help support your kids, and how you can harness the power of a specific type of play, "structured play" (think games with rules someone else made up), to encourage 4 skills that are key to building resilience.
To help me in this conversation, I have brought in Dr. G (Deborah Gilboa, MD). She is a board certified family physician and Resilience Expert. She works with families and businesses to improve resilience and strengthen mental health. She's currently working with ThinkFun, a games company, and the larger toys and games industry to strengthen kids' mental, emotional and social health through play.
She will help us learn:
How toys and games can help build resilience
Four specific resilience skills that can be taught to children through play
Structured Play: Benefits, and how it can strengthens kid's mental health
Other resources available for adults at home and for educators to help protect and strengthen kids
To connect with Dr. G, follow her on Instagram @askdoctorg and visit her website www.meshhelps.org.
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello, everybody! Welcome back to The Balanced Parent Podcast on this week's episode we're going to be talking with a doctor about the healing benefits of play. Now, this podcast is coming in as a part of my 30 days of play challenge and we've spent the past few weeks talking about unstructured independent play and the beautiful benefits that it has for children. I want to give you a full well rounded picture of how play can help support your kids. So I'm bringing in Dr. Deborah Gilboa, Dr. G, to talk with us a little bit about how we can use play in a very specific way to support our kids. Dr. G, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Dr. G: Thank you very much for having me. I want to say right up front, if you are a parent, like I am and I have four kids who listen to that, you thought a very specific way. Are there rules? I don't have time for this. I'm stressed about this already and I just want to point out that what we're gonna talk about is specific meaning, the kind of way we tend not to think about how valuable play is. It isn't that you now have to take out a piece of paper and a pen amidst everything else you're doing and write down a series of rules. That's not what we mean by structured.
So okay, who am I? I'm a family doctor, an MD. I see patients in the office. I'm also a mom of four boys, six years between the first and the last and I am a resilience expert. I've spent the last decade researching what it means for people to navigate change and come through it with their mental health intact. That's what resilience is, it's the ability to navigate change and come through it with intention and purpose toward your goal and how we teach that skill to children. Which is I think why I got a reach out almost a year ago, from the toys and games industry. And that's how I got into this area in particular.
You know, I've played with or tried to avoid playing with my children over the last 20 years, maybe an equal measure depending on what else was on my to-do list. But in terms of my focus on it, the toys and games industry, one particular manufacturer in that industry came to me and said, hey, we think we're, we could do a better job meeting where parents are now. We are hearing that parents are much more concerned about their kids' mental health than they are in their stem skills, their ability to get into college by playing with our toys. So what is it that parents, what is it the kids are really going through, what do parents and educators and grownups at home need to be able to help them? And how could toys and games play a role?
So we dove into the research and I helped them by first off creating a white paper and I won't go into it, I promise. But we can give the link if it's for people who like that kind of thing in your listenership. Totally. We created this white paper outlining where kids' mental health really is and you know, that kids' mental health was struggling and on the wane for a decade. But the pandemic really, well the way I think about it is turning on the lights in a kitchen that has cockroaches made it a lot more apparent what was going on and worsen things as well. So we're seeing more mental health struggles in kids, especially during the pandemic. And then we discovered through our research that in the toys and games industry, mostly toy manufacturers and retailers have been just trying to create comfort items for kids.
More plush toys like squish mellows and more fidget toys. And those are really valuable for helping people recover in acute stress. But what they don't do is teach skills and a lot of games, especially about toys too, they’re really pride themselves on teaching skills and it's what they're really good for all kinds of different skills that might be math skills, but it's also cooperation skills and communication skills and perseverance skills. And so they wanted to know what do our games already teach and what could we design toys and games to do, that would not just help kids recover, but would strengthen them.
Really give them the skills they need for whatever is coming next. I won't drag you through all of the research. But what it comes down to is kids can learn the skills that make them more resilient that help them to bolster their own mental health and they can do that through play some of that debt you've talked about in your series on unstructured play because they learn to fend off boredom. They become more creative. They have to communicate with others if they're playing with anyone else, they have to. But the skills that we really focused on work for.
Laura: Okay, good. So these are the four skills that
Dr. G: Four skills that you mean, that we have research to show that you can use play to build these skills in your kid.
Laura: That you need more resilience that helps you more resilience.
Dr. G: Strengthen your mental health for future challenges. Okay, the first is storytelling. So every time, I find this really encouraging because the number of stories that my kids have told me about Pokemon characters and magic, the gathering and obscure Youtubers that I haven't totally followed. It turns out that just them telling those stories is valuable. So if your kid picks up official price and while you're trying to cook dinner and goes, (babbling) they are building a skill because storytelling is the skill that kids turn into self-advocacy. The ability to go to an adult or appear and say this is what's happening for me.
This is how I feel. This is what I experienced. This is what I think happened to them. This is why I need help or this is why I don't need help. Self-advocacy and storytelling strengthens kids and protect them. That's one. Beautiful. The next is problem-solving and I don't think it surprises anybody to know that it helps our kids learn problem-solving, but here's at its base how it really protects kids from future distress. When kids see themselves as good problem solvers, they are less overwhelmed by challenge. Not overwhelmed. I learned this, anecdotally I learned this lesson in a really funny way when my third son was in kindergarten. He came to me on a Saturday with this kitchen tool that's like it's a plastic handle with a wire mesh basket on the end.
My people use it for getting matzo balls out of soup. Okay, so you can picture what I mean, I hope he brings this to me and he says mommy, how do you clean this? And it looked totally clean and I'm the mom of four sons. So I was instantly suspicious and I said why do you need to clean it? And he said, oh my favorite lego fell in the toilet. But Miss Dewitt says I'm a problem solver and I was like, okay let's solve this problem with bleach but way to go because this kid, a few months earlier, if his favorite lego fell in the toilet, he would have just dissolved in a puddle of tears and like gotten flushed down with the lego, he would have not handled that distress well at all.
So a parent-teacher conferences a couple of weeks later I said to Ms Dewitt, his kindergarten teacher, I told her the story and I said how did you do that? And she said, oh that's no problem. She said I can tell you exactly what I do. I have 27 kids in my classroom, they bring me 482 problems every 12 seconds, I cannot solve them all. So I have a habit which is, I look around and if everyone's conscious and nobody's bleeding, I say well you're a good problem solver, what do you think? And then I go back to what I was doing and she said and by around October or November they're bringing me fewer problems.
She said as a matter of fact, just last week I was at the art center and there's a big crash across the room and I look up and everyone's conscious and nobody's bleeding. And I hear one kindergartner say to another, well what good problem solvers, what do you think? And like that was the moment where I, as a parent realized that my goal isn't to solve my kids’ problems, it's to teach them to be a good problem solver. The research shows that when kids know that they have some experience problem solving and they feel sort of competent at it in some situations when they face a problem they're less likely to totally melt down or they recover faster from that meltdown.
Laura: And okay, so let me just dive in right here because lots of the folks listening adore problem-solving with their kids and definitely want to raise problem-solvers. So how does that skill get taught through play? What, can you give me some examples?
Dr. G: Yes. So, okay, I'm not going to be able to rattle all these off and now I'm embarrassed, I might have to pull up the website and read you some, but we made a grid. We said, okay, we're talking now about kids 3 to 13 in this research and in this initiative, and if I can just make a plug this, all this information is available on MESH, which stands for mental, emotional, and social health, meshhelps.org. So we made a grid and said developmentally 3 to 13 is big. So 3 to 6-year-olds, 7 to 10-year-olds, and 11 to 13-year-olds for neurotypical kids, those three age groups.
And for each of these skills, the two we've talked about in the two I'm gonna mention, we have examples of toys and games from a variety of manufacturers that teach those skills either because they were designed to, or they happened to. This fisher price, they designed their toys to teach kids creativity and storytelling. That was their purpose for sure. But it turns out that that's not why Pokemon designed their cards, but it turns into there's a lot of storytelling that goes along with playing Pokemon.
So it may have been intentional, it may have been accidental, but we identify lists of toys and games that teach these skills. The two others just really quickly. One is progressive challenge over the course of play. That teaches more than anything, perseverance and self-regulation. And so progress, any game, any experience that like learning to play the piano that has progressive challenge gets harder as you go. That is something that strengthens kids, mental health. And the last thing and this will go to everything you've talked about, I'm sure, and that is any experience of play that draws a kid closer to their adults. There in the playing of it or the telling about it afterwards. Even if you set your kids on a scavenger hunt for all the missing socks in your house while you vacuum. That is a game that will bring kids closer to their adults because they're, you're running the game. They're coming back to show you every disgusting crunchy balled-up dog harry socks.
So those four skills, toys, and games, not to say you can't learn those skills through unstructured play, But I want parents to know two things. One, if I'm gonna sit down and play a game with my kid or I'm gonna purchase a game or a toy for a kid that I care about or I'm going to suggest that they go do this. Which one should I aim them towards? How do I talk to them about it during or afterwards to strengthen that skill and that some of the resources on this website is we created lists of questions parents can ask after a play, like you went to a play date and they say, you know, we played, I'm trying to think because some don't build these skills by the way.
Like games that are super random like chutes and ladders where you're spinning a spinner and just moving your, they may be fun. I'm not saying chutes and ladders is a bad idea, but it doesn't really, it's not really progressively harder as you go. It doesn't teach a lot of problem-solving. You can only do the same thing. It may teach them self-regulation. It doesn't teach a lot of communication. You can play chutes and ladders and never speak a word to the person you're playing with, right? So, but if they come home and they tell me that they play at risk, which I don't know how that would happen because if you're playing risk, you're still playing risk. It's a 24-hour game, it never ended.
But if they come home and they tell me they did this thing at school or they played this game with a friend or with this toy, if this gives me some ideas of developmentally appropriate questions, I can ask that will reinforce these skills, that will point out that they learned them. Because the second thing we really wanted parents to know is you don't have to be involved in every play, experience, your child has to be a good parent. And if you're not involved in that moment because you're doing something that pays the bills or organizes your household or gives you a moment of rest, it can still be valuable to them.
Laura: Absolutely. Okay, so I just, I want to kind of back us up a little bit just so that our listeners are clear. So tell me the difference, just very quickly between structured and unstructured play. And then let's dig into the structured piece of it a little bit.
Dr. G: Right. So at its most basic, the difference is rules.
Laura: Okay.
Dr. G: Structure play has rules that somebody else set. A lot of time in unstructured play. You'll sit down to play with your kid and they have to explain to you the rules they've made up in their head. I know you have to always have your pinky touching the ground at all times or whatever it is. So you can get rules with unstructured play, but structured, place considered rules that were created by somebody else that you agree to for the purpose of this experience.
Laura: Right. Or a toy that has some very specific purpose needs to be used in an unintended way. Yeah.
Dr. G: Yeah. And for that, I'm picturing, you know, a toy where you have to fit where the goal with the toy is to fit the shapes into the correct holes or two, which isn't a game. It's a toy for sure. Blocks. You're either creating, you're creating a shape, whether it's mostly two-dimensional or mostly three-dimensional, there's some structure to it. There are opportunities. I have seen my kids turn blocks into all kinds of things and not just weapons to be involved in unstructured play, but structured play is when there's rules and a goal that's set by somebody else.
Laura: Right, okay. Okay. And so then what are some examples of kind of maybe if we could do one example for each of those four areas of a toy or a game that parents would probably have easy access to, that they could invite their kids into.
Dr. G: So I'd love to if you don't mind. We wanted parents who heard about this to be able to start on this tonight. Right. So we created resources in those three developmental groups that I talked about 3 to 67 to 10, 11, 13 for the types of products that build mesh skills. But we also created a list for each about building mesh skills at home. What do you have at home right now? That you could build mesh skills into play tonight?
Laura: Let's go to this. I'm on your website, let's go to the 3 to 6-year-olds.
Dr. G: I would love for you to pick that age range because I think that's a lot of our listeners. So we said, okay with 3 to 6-year-olds, if you want to build problem-solving and perseverance, you could ask them to sort utensils into their correct spots in a drawer. You could bring pairs of shoes to place next to the beds or in the closet of their owners. You can match kitchen storage containers and lids and then organize it in the cabinet and you might be thinking can 3-6 year olds do that and I can say absolutely developmentally they can and there are games that mimic those things but aren't nearly as useful that exist on shelves right now.
You could build storytelling by asking your child to make different mood faces. Like ask them to be emojis. That's something that brings even for kids this age often, although it's a little better with 7 to 10-year-olds, you then can take pictures with your phone and then let your child tell you which picture was which emotion. And this is something that can get more and more creative. You can have them make a face like they just tasted a terrible, terrible food or smell the terrible fart. You can make this as silly or funny or meaningful as you want it to be.
And this is, I think it's pretty easy to see how teaching kids to express and recognize nuanced emotion is really valuable to them. But there's some rock-solid research they did where they showed that. And so I'm gonna push on for parents of boys right here. They showed that for the most part, girls could name as many as 50 different colors by kindergarten and 50 different emotions. And interestingly boys could name up to 10 colors on average and only about eight emotions from facial expressions. The more nuanced and more names we give kids, the better job they will do in their interactions with others, but also in their ability to advocate for themselves to recognize what they're feeling and express.
Laura: That's beautiful. Let me share a couple of storytelling things that we do at our house because the research on storytelling and its benefits for kids is phenomenal and long-lasting. It's so beautiful. So definitely encouraging your family to tell their family stories that helps children have a sense of place and a sense of belonging in a family. But one thing we do at dinner time is we go around our table and tell a story together where each person says one part of the story, one sentence or something and then we build on each other and it's so much fun.
And it teaches a lot of these skills because sometimes you're thinking about where the story is going to go and someone takes it in a different direction. You have to self-regulate and manage that and come up with a different plan, solve problems. So I, we love doing that at dinner time. And another one that we do is my, one of my daughters, she is sometimes nervous about separating at night time when it's time to go to sleep. She would rather be with us, but she doesn't sleep well in the same bed because my husband snores…
Dr. G: Nobody does.
Laura: No one sleep. Yeah, so, so we always plan to meet in her dreams and so we use storytelling to plan out a dream together with kind of three things that we do. She kind of recites it to me and then she thinks about that as she goes to sleep and thinks about meeting me in her dream. So I love storytelling so much.
Dr. G: That's maybe the sweetest thing I've ever heard. I'm gonna definitely suggest that with my 16-year-old son. I'm kidding.
Laura: Well, he can meet a friend in his dreams.
Dr. G: No, he would be like, uh, okay mom, bye. All right.
Laura: I mean, that probably does have an age limit, but..
Dr. G: Not necessarily. I think especially if you started that as a tradition. My kids definitely let me get away with happy things that I've been doing their whole lives. But introducing them late in the game is sometimes a little here.
Laura: All right. And so then we did storytelling. What about facing challenges?
Dr. G: So you can do this in a couple of ways. One of the ones that I like if you don't mind a little chaos in your personal space is have the kids gather up every pillow in the house and then create pillow towers. Now you can do this competitively in my house, I don't seem to be able to do anything that isn't competitively, but you can do it collaboratively or you can do it just be your own personal best. You know, maybe your three-year-old can only stack up three or four pillows, and your six-year-old, that's not fair. They can easily figure out how to stack up more by leaning it against the couch or whatever. So it's not, can you beat your sibling? It's can you do better than you did last time? And the higher it goes, the harder it is to keep it stable, right? But it's a silly thing that hurts no one, it causes lots of giggles.
Laura: That sounds like lots of fun. I can see that being something fun to, to build a little bit of sibling cohesion, getting it to be a grown-up against kids sort of thing. Getting the kids working together, could be fun too.
Dr. G: Yeah, absolutely. And then, the last one I wanted to talk about is drawing adults and kids together. I'm just gonna fess up on your play podcast to say that I am not a hunker down on the floor and love playing with my kids.
Laura: None of us are. There are some parents, I'm sorry…
Dr. G: …people who convinced me that they are, but I've also met people who convinced me that they like eating vegan and also that they enjoy yoga and I don't like either of those things. So, you know, I have to believe there are people who feel differently about these things than I do, but there are a lot of ways to help kids feel played with and connect with them that aren't boring to you. The best way is to invite your kids into something you genuinely enjoy. I was most inspired I think actually by me myself, a guy who had taken an old t-shirt, white t-shirt and drawn a cool race track on the back of it and then put it on and laid on the floor and had his kids play cars on his back because then like rest, massage supervision and we're playing together kids, it's great.
But you can have a dance party, you can play, I spy in a room where you're playing a game with your kids, but also you're straightening up if that makes you feel more calm and peaceful about your space because when they spy something, you play, I spy something out of place. And then you get a point for guessing what it is and the other person gets a point if they can put it away in lots of ways to take the things that make you feel better that you actually enjoy that feel, whether productivity feels good to you or rest feels good to you or whatever the thing is and invite your kids into it, in a way that's developmentally appropriate.
Laura: Yeah, I love that, I love that spin on, I spy. I know lots of parents feel pressure from kind of, the kind of the way that we're, I don't know, advertised to his parents, we're told from the very beginning that, you know, good parents have messy floors and dirty counters because they're playing with their kids. And I know that that is really hard for a lot of people to hear because having clear counters and tidied floors is what they need in order to be able to relax and settle into play and feel peaceful. Yeah.
And there's, I just, you know, I might not be someone who needs that, but there's certainly, there's a variety of ways and lots of good ways to be a good parent. So I love bringing that in. I also think it's important that you know, a lot of the way we think play has to happen is by us getting down on the floor and not all of us have the mobility to be able to do that. I spent three years of my parenthood journey, parenting journey disabled and so a lot of my play needed to happen while I was on the couch. And there's a, I made up tons of games where the kids felt super connected, had lots of fun, and didn't involve me moving at all because I couldn't. So I think there's…
Dr. G: I remember, I remember getting a ride from somebody's parent home from something as a kid and they had a minivan and this was a new thing at the time and we're in the back of the minivan and then the mom, we must have been too rowdy, and the mom said okay girls, okay, okay, we get to do it, we get to play the game and the other girls, the girls, the daughters of this woman were like you get to play the game, and I was like, what's the game? And they're like, it's the quiet game, you have to be the last person to make a sound, and I was like okay, and mom's like and go it was totally quiet and at some point I remember thinking she has these children totally snookered, this is the most boring thing ever, but she did it man, her daughters, I got dropped off at home and I went inside and I was like, you will not believe this thing that this family does, but it totally works for them as an adult now, I'm incredibly impressed with that woman.
Laura: That's awesome, you know what my 10-year-old would have said if she had been in that situation, she would've been like, you know, she's just trying to make you be quiet right? My 10-year-old doesn't necessary have the filter.
Dr. G: That is just the person behind the curtain behind, you know that right?
Laura: My seven-year-old still likes me to do playful things with her to help her do things like we, you know, we have this thing where when she doesn't want to brush her teeth, I pretend to be finding animals and her teeth as we're brushing, you know? And she, my older one will just look at her and be like, she's just trying to get you to brush her teeth. The young one, the younger one will be like, I know it's fun, so what, you know, it's so funny how one can feel kind of manipulated by that and the other one just feels like I'm doing something fun with her to make something boring, more fun.
Dr. G: Do you know how I got mommy to play with me?
Laura: Yeah, right? Like exactly, like yes, I got I got to feel connected while doing this boring thing that we have to do anyway. I love that. Okay, so I think that I love this conversation. I love this idea that there is a place and a lot of value for some structured games that we can be playing. Are there any like, toys that you love, toys or games that you just love that you in your research that you found that you're just like, oh man, I wish I had that when my boys were little or are there anything that really jumps out to you?
Dr. G: Yeah, there are a couple that jump out to me. One is something and thank goodness for babysitters, right? Because babysitters are those near-peer mentors who are between your age and your kids age and they often really easily engage in fun and remind you of the value, although there are some older ones too. You know, I mean just like flat-out puppets and race cars and blocks and toys that our grandparents would recognize are really valuable in this space, but there's some really cool ones, I'm gonna shout out, think fun, which is the, the toy company that actually the games company that actually hired me to do this work because they have a couple that are so good at this gravity maze and laser maze. Are so good at the new and progressive challenges and rush hour for kids as far as problem-solving and of rush hour and Safari, which is a similar idea.
Laura: Yeah, that game is a, it's like a little plastic cars in a grid and you're trying to get one car from one side to the other. My kids love it.
Dr. G: And it's their single-player games. They can be collaborative as well, but they can be single-player games. So this is great for like you've got both your kids and only one of them has the doctor's appointment and the other one has to sit there. Those kind of moments where you don't have to play with them, you bring it, they play it, and then in the car ride home, you can use our list of questions you can ask about, you know, was there a moment when you were frustrated and how do you, how do you handle that?
You didn't show me signs of frustration. What did you do to handle your frustration, your discomfort, and the next time your kid is uncomfortable because it turns out that they can't wear the outfit they wanted to wear or they're too sick to go to their friend's birthday party or their friend cancels their birthday party because they're sick. You can say, hey, what was that thing you did when you were playing that game to navigate your frustration? Would that be useful now?
Laura: Yeah. Okay, great. Are there other like games that are, you know like that people can pick up? Like I like, I like Jenga, we have this, we have this set of agendas that are multicolored and we assign different kind of questions or categories to the colors so that when you pull out a color you have to, you know, say an animal that you like or you know, and that is a fun way to play this game or when I was a practicing therapist, we would do therapy Jenga where we had questions and you pulled it out and you had to answer the questions. So I mean I love, I love Jenga.
Dr. G: Okay, so I will again shout out some old-school stuff like action figures, jump rope, those kind of things. But also there's, have you heard of mole rats in space?
Laura: No.
Dr. G: So that's what I really like for problem-solving and teaching perseverance. I really like story cubes. Have you seen those?
Laura: Yeah, I think they're probably, I probably know what they are.
Dr. G: Amazing for storytelling and so are the fresh dolls and for progressive challenges. There's Klutz has this game called Sew Mini Animals. It's, it feels like a craft, there's a game part of it. Minecraft has a magnetic travel puzzle. If you have any Minecraft people in your life that they love that. There's a rhino hero, rhino-like rhinoceros, rhino hero from Haba, that is really excellent for progressive challenges. But if you're wondering as, especially as kids get older, what do you do that bring kids adult interaction in ways that is not just like painful for the adult or games that are actually fun for the adults in the 7 to 10-year-old age range. I really like apples to apples and ticket to ride.
Laura: Oh yeah, those are two fun ones.
Dr. G: Yeah, really good. Jungle speed is really fun. And I just brought jungle speed. So my kids now are 14 through 20 and we brought jungle speed on an international trip we took because it is one physical wooden object that's maybe five inches long and about an inch in diameter and little cards that comes in a little sack and we brought it with us and we played it in the Airbnb and my 14 through 20-year-olds plus my nephew plus my niece plus my sister-in-law, like we had a blast. Fun.
That's great. Yeah, that's an advantage. I would say by the way too structured play. As your kids age a lot of parents I know are like, okay, but will they still want to play with me when they're teenagers? They still will play still be a part of our lives because I see the advantages and it's a time where we're really enjoying each other as opposed to, you know, not every family dinner is puppies and rainbows. Not everybody every trip to see family or to go to your house of worship or whatever. It's not always awesome, but play is usually pretty awesome until it isn't, which is fine because that's an important part of it, of the learning too. And structured play is easier to track through the ages than unstructured play.
You can't usually as easily at least I can't because there's so much bigger than me. Get down on the ground and wrestle and tickle with your 14 or your 17-year-old, but you can sit down and play jungle speed or you can sit down and play ticket to ride. So having a habit of games, especially toys too, but especially games having that habit. I actually just did an interview. I really appreciated from your teen magazine talking about how and why to engage teenagers in gameplay. And one of the things we found is teenagers want to keep playing with their family. They don't feel like their friends replace their family. They want both.
Laura: Yeah, they do and they want that connection and we have to like, I mean, so yes, most of my listeners do have younger kids, but we have some folks who are moving into the tweens and so building those, those rhythms. Yeah, those rhythms and traditions, you know, so that, you know, having a weekly game night where you eat dinner while you're playing something.
Dr. G: Or if you're less aspirational a monthly game.
Laura: A monthly game or whenever the kids are, you know, reluctant to come to the table game night. You know?
Dr. G: That's my brother and sister-in-law, they buy a new game every New Year's Eve and that's part of our New Year's Eve. Thing is to sit and play a game we've never played.
Laura: Yeah, I love it. Okay, well, I really appreciated this conversation Dr. G. and you've given us some really great resources and I think it's so, it's so important. Especially that I just love that last piece that as kids get older and the imaginative play kind of maybe false the side or changes. Yeah. Being able to have some more structured play as an option, as an opportunity to connect. I love that. Thank you so much.
Dr. G: Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time.
Laura: Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.
And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um, and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family, and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.
All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!