I have finished--oh yes! FINISHED!--a new parenting book called Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen. *applause* It was most useful and I shall be picking up more o' dat!
Chiefly what I found useful was that play can often have a sideways purpose we adults don't always recognize. He suggests adult play with children can and often should be used to reverse the normal power structures. It's a chance for the adult to cry at the idea of the child leaving (all in good fun, and quite pretend), or a chance for the adult to bumble into something and utterly fail, or a chance for the kid to tell Mommy to Go To Bed This Minute!
He's suggested one game that has been a lifesaver so far: GO and STOP. Mom freezes when they say stop and moves again when they say go. This is now how I get nails trimmed and knotted hair brushed.
The next game to try is the WIN/LOSE game, where we flip a coin and pretend that winning is absolutely totally the most important thing ever, and losing is the worst. Flipping the coin over and over so we can really practice getting dramatic about winning or losing in a completely silly way--this is what we need, to take the stress away from winning and losing. Cohen says that kids need to experience both winning and losing, and the parents should take their cues from the kids as to which they need. He says a kid who often wants you to play your hardest sometimes flip flops and wants you to take it easy. All natural.
I've also learned that nothing has to be dramatic about behavior. Even bad behavior can be dealt with in good humor. That is my greatest challenge yet of course.
I don't feel I have the social skills to deal with bad behavior in good humor. With that said...
My five year old came to me the other day and told me about each of his friends who have an iPad, and how he wished -he- had one too. I told him what I always do: he'd have time for all those fun video games later. But why not -now-? he finally asked.
So I sat him down and told him that I had video games and TV galore when I was young; that I had learned to play them well, and had NOT learned things like how to play with my friends and how to tell funny jokes. I told him this was his most important job now: to learn to play with his friends. There would be plenty of time for everything else after he had learned that.
Leon got it. He really did. You can see confidence in a child's body when they learn and truly understand something new; his posture straightened, he looked me in the eye. He was just fine with the arrangement.
