Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Chris answers a question about a child who simply will not play alone.
Cody:
Our son will be turning five in a few months and by all accounts, he is a kind, curious, active little boy. By and large he is well behaved compared to some of his peers, and he's very independent for his age except in one area: He refuses independent play.
This kid will not sit and color by himself, or look at a picture book, or play pretend games with an imaginary friend. At home, he is constantly asking his mom or me to entertain him. And I like playing with him, I do! But the problem is his play is extremely prescriptive: He tells you what character you have to be, what you have to say, how to play, etc. No going off book. We've tried instituting a timer ("Mom and Dad are tired and need 15 minutes, then we'll play") but that hasn't worked. He will gladly hang around and whine about us not playing instead of just... going to play.
I'm trying to remind myself that very soon he won't want to play with Dad and I'll miss these moments. Learning to entertain oneself out of boredom is an important skill and he just straight up refuses to engage. I feel like these are the years when he should be doing a lot of imaginative play and I worry that by being such involved parents, we've overcorrected and created a kid incapable of using his imagination.
Cody, my friend, you terrific parent, the thing you are describing is super normal. You child is four years old. He has experienced so incredibly little of the world. He is at the very beginning of the part of his life where he develops habits and routines and moves. You're right to want him to learn to overcome boredom with curiosity and imagination. Please do not worry too much that he isn't there yet. Kids are endlessly adaptable. If you and Mom possess imaginations and have hobbies and so forth, the chances are overwhelmingly good that without any additional effort on your parts he will turn out the same way. The great news is your kid actually wants to play, and he has such vivid ideas in his mind about how the game should go that his instructions are hyper-specific. His imagination is firing like crazy. He'll get there. Try not to worry too much about when he gets there. He will get there.
Now I have to be annoying and articulate something that you probably already know: Creative, imaginative, independent play, to the extent that it might be a fruit of what we could call productive boredom, is not to be found in 15 minutes of waiting for Mom and Dad. When I was just a little bit older than your son, shortly after breakfast my dad would tell my siblings and me to put our shoes on, and then he would shoo us out of the house, and then we were not expected to return for hours. If my older sibling was, say, visiting a friend's house, and my other sibling was, say, down with strep throat, I was still expected to put on socks and shoes and a jacket and to get the hell out of the house and not to return until I was, like, appreciably older. Great crushing depths of boredom were explored. I am not necessarily recommending this method, only pointing out that whatever I got from being told to figure it out for most of the waking hours of my childhood came alongside the knowledge that my parents would not be available at all for what to me were basically unfathomable lengths of time.
In my experience, a kid does not go from pestering Dad for attention to true Tom Sawyer shit in little orderly packets of solo time. A kid needs to be so bored that they are bored even with complaining. I want to impress upon you that it is fine and normal to tell your son that you need, shit, an entire hour or even consecutive hours without any interruptions. You find his inability to play independently for 15 minutes frustrating, but I just simply do not believe that 15 minutes is enough time for boredom to develop into creativity. I would first make sure that your son is encountering and enduring real-deal boredom before worrying too much that he doesn't do real well with independence. Just be prepared for there to be some emotional storming as you help him to develop some stamina. If boredom is a route to the land of confident independence, along the way it passes through alleys of bewildered resentment and vast dreary wastelands of uninspired self-pity. Between where you are and where you want to be, with your son, there is probably some amount of conflict to traverse, some realm of mutual discomfort you have hoped to avoid.
You do not need to immediately confront your son with extremes of disengagement and sensory deprivation. Here is something to try: Tomorrow, when your son is eating breakfast, think up some tasks you can assign to him later in the afternoon. Pick no more than three things. For this first round of tasks, make them all real-deal chores. Make them quick things but useful. Then, grab a grease pen or a dry-erase marker and write these two or three tasks on a whiteboard or a sliding glass door or a mirror or a window, with little check boxes next to them.
It's OK if your son can't read the tasks. When he gets home from preschool, or an hour before dinnertime, or whichever comes first, take him to the list and tell him what's on it. Here is the deal: Once he has completed the tasks (and checked them off on the list) and after he has eaten dinner, his time is entirely his own. He can do with this time anything that is safe for him to do, and Mom and/or Dad will even be available to participate, depending upon the chosen activity. He can play 30 minutes of a video game. He can watch an hour of SpongeBob. He can zoom around with a remote-control car. Think of some fun things he can do and mention them, but the point is that you are sincerely going to let him decide how to spend the time between dinner and bedtime, so long as he first completes the tasks.
With my daughter, the real-deal tasks are things like "Put away the silverware in the dishwasher," or "Move the full bag of recycling onto the porch," or "Vacuum up the sawdust on the work table in the basement," things that she knows how to do and can knock out pretty quickly. When we first started this in our house, I did plenty of helping. The idea, here, was to give her some responsibilities, to get her used to having chores and tasks between the end of school and the start of fuck-around time, and to help her to feel that real autonomy is a reward that she can earn, and should feel good about. It also gets her buzzing around on things without me having to sweep her along, and without her pestering me for attention. If a lifetime of working for a living has taught me anything, it is that the condition of having nothing to do feels a whole lot better, a whole lot more pregnant with possibility, if it comes after having managed a bunch of damned responsibilities.
I suspect that some part of the reason why your son is grasping for parental engagement is because he is most often getting a compromised version of it, and thus isn't really getting from it what he wants. That can become an unfortunate kind of mental habit: The things I want for myself are problematic and socially complicated and are gained by emotional leverage. Getting what you want on those terms sucks shit, and brushes against shame. I brought a version of this all the way into adulthood, this absolutely unspoken and broadly unacknowledged feeling that I was basically an outlaw anytime I was enjoying myself. Part of the reason why you want to avoid the pattern of your son whining his way into parental engagement is so that he can really enjoy and feel good about parental engagement, by experiencing more of the engagement that is enthusiastically given by parents who have the time and bandwidth for full attention. I think your kid is old enough to appreciate the difference between that and the frazzled, exhausted engagement of parents who lack the energy and bandwidth for more of this kid shit, even if he couldn't describe it with words.
I probably would not describe my daughter as a child who struggles in particular with independent play, but in almost all cases she would prefer to have a parent playing with her, just like your son, and sometimes she will whine and raise hell. And sometimes, yes, we feel bad about being unavailable and so we sort of slump forward into some activity, hoping to abort it minutes later and get back to our grown-up stuff. The afternoon list, and the reward it promises for the completion of tasks, helps me, too, to remember to make time for my child. Sometimes she just wants to make someone else responsible for her good time, but often enough she is a little kid who really badly wants focused time with her parents, and it's helpful for me to remind myself that she deserves that, and that at her age she's supposed to have that craving. If, after dinner, with the freedom she has earned by doing her tasks, my daughter wants to summon her parents into some weird game where she makes all the rules and working off-book is verboten, so be it: As you said, we do after all want to play with our children. We are just trying to balance so many damned things.
There is a trick to the afternoon list thing, one that I haven't yet mentioned, but it's the real reason why I'm recommending it. This part, I am nervous to admit, I picked up from reading It by Stephen King. In the book, Mike Hanlon lives on a farm and his dad is a farmer and they are both very busy with farm work. Mike comes home from school each day prepared for a list of serious farm chores, but every so often Mike's dad will scrap the farm stuff and send Mike to explore a local ruin or catch butterflies or whatever, and to bring home a story to tell. My version of this is smaller—we do not live in Derry, after all—but I try to regularly mix in some assigned fun. At least once a week the list will say something like, "There is a gourd/hunk of wood/large rock on the front porch. Paint it with many colors." Sometimes the list will include one simple chore and also something like "Draw a funny picture of Grumps (one of her grandfathers is called 'Grumps') and show it to Mama." Last week my wife put on there "Stand by the cherry tree and throw these five water balloons at Daddy's car." Just two days ago, in an inspired moment, I clomped down into the muddy woods, took a photo of a mushroom growing on a log, then assigned my daughter to put on her rain boots and to find this one mushroom. Together we drew a little map.
The idea, for me, is to assign her things that she might later choose to do for fun, or might even decide to pick up again immediately after dinner, but that she might never entirely come up with on her own. It's happened already: Recently she stopped painting a t-shirt in order to eat dinner, but leapt up from the table the moment she could get permission so that she could race back onto the porch and finish her design. Here is the t-shirt:
I think that's a very good outcome. She wasn't necessarily creative about solving boredom, but she was creative about painting a t-shirt, because it was assigned, and she was excited to do more of it. Sometimes the list is three boring chores and she grumbles about it and I do a lot of helping and after dinner she watches an hour of Star Wars, and no great victories are won for the cause of raising an inspired child. Sometimes the only task on the list is something ridiculous, like to find a way to travel from the kitchen to the front door without touching the ground, and after dinner she decides we all have to go on a walk together, and Mom and Dad exchange a tired but proud fist bump. So long as she is learning to accept responsibility for how she spends her time, and is developing healthy ideas about what she might do with it, I figure we're on the right track.
There's your homework, Cody: Assign your kid some tasks, to get them moving independently and excited about autonomy, and mix into the tasks some occasional fun, some adventures, some blending of assignment and inspiration.
I cannot promise that this will inspire your kid into a phase of confident independence, but it's worth a shot. It has worked very well for us, and we live in a country home in the middle of nowhere, with an almost-six-year-old only child who has literally one (1) other kid in her kindergarten class, and who is occasionally desperately, achingly starved for playmates. There are still times when friction between her child world and our adult world causes her to explode with frustration. I tell myself that I have at least given her tools for entertaining herself, and for occasionally gaining over the household about as much authority as her five-year-old brain can imagine. And the afternoon list buys us parents a little time to finish up our own shit, so that when we do find ourselves playing one of her weirdly specific games, we are at least fully present.
Two final things: First, if you can afford one, get your kid a Yoto, and some cards to go with it. I hate to simply point at a piece of technology, but this one is aces. It's not a screen thing, it's an audio thing: Stories, audiobooks, jokes, episodic fiction, music, and learning modules, pitched at kids. A little handful of options and your child is off and running. It's great at helping a kid to think and make decisions about how they want to entertain themselves. Sometimes, when the weather is nice, my daughter will take her Yoto outside and climb onto the hood of my car and spend half an hour listening to, I shit you not, Queen's greatest hits, or Robin Hood: A Musical Adventure, or a few audio episodes of Sesame Street. Just knotting dandelions, thinking thoughts, breathing fresh air, and grooving to ABBA's catalogue of hit singles, which is just a touch of Yorkshire dialect and Swedish pop music away from everything Frances Hodgson Burnett was on about.
Second, I think you're on the right track when you remind yourself that before long your son will no longer have as much interest in playing with Dad. Chances are great that even if you change nothing your son will soon start to develop more independence than your heart can stand, and then you will spend the remainder of your days wondering why THE HELL you ever declined to play his weird games and submit to his strictest micromanagement. Try out the afternoon list, but remind yourself of what you've got there, in your wonderful son: By all accounts he is a kind, curious, active little boy, you said it yourself. He's doing great. You're doing great.
