Back in our youth,
my brother and I were pretty good fort-builders. With a stolen borrowed sheet, some
clothespins and yarn, we could finagle a cover over the front hedges or a
lean-to in between a couple of trees.
Give us a couple fried bologna sandwiches and plastic cups of Kool-Aid
and our mother wouldn’t see us until the streetlights came on.
My kids have the
luxury of a play structure in the backyard, a requirement of every suburban
home these days. They’ve taken some
leftover house paint to decorate it and hauled some make-shift furniture into
it. On occasion, however, they will
construct a second outdoor home with a blanket and some plastic poles left over
from something, or a separate indoor room with the couch pillows and a
sheet. I don’t participate at all in any
of the construction.
So, my mouth
dropped in awe when I saw this article about these amazing forts that moms
could build with – no, for! – their kids.
These things had lights, poles, semi-permanent structures, contraptions
hanging from the ceiling of the living room. And if you didn’t want to actually
sew and cut, you could order them all ready made.
Have we been doing
this fort-building wrong all along, just making it up from whatever was around
the house? Nah. I shook my head at this
article and the guilt-laden message it sends.
Moms: unless you are taking charge of building these play structures for
your kids, you’re failing as a mom.
I think the real
message should be: Moms, step out of the way and let your kids develop their
own creativity.
That cardboard
“house”? Great. Give the kids the box, some markers, and a pair of scissors and
let them figure it out. It will be just
as fun without moms perfectly straight cuts and lined brickwork.
The tent in the
bedroom? Wonderful idea for a hideaway. Tell the kids where the sheets are,
give them some binder clips and send them off to build their own space. They will be fine without mom sewing hemmed
covers for the sides.
There are a lot of
articles out there on how to play with and entertain our kids. They would have you believe that if you are
not hop-scotching and crawling through the playground tubes and providing
perfectly pitched pots for the kid to bang on, you are not doing your job. And we moms, myself included, internalize
that message. If you are not entertaining your kids, you are abandoning them.
Show your kids you love them by being with them all the time, doing everything
with them.
What we’re doing is
crippling their creativity. Every time
we say “here, look what I did for you” or “here, this is the thing you should
play with and how you should play with it,” we’re not letting our kids develop
their ideas and problem-solving skills. The
other day, I took my daughter to the playground. She climbed up on this spinning
structure thing and hung upside down and asked me to spin it around. Umm, that’s
not the way I would’ve played on it, mainly because my body is not as nimble
and partly because my adult mind had an idea of the prescribed way – the safest
way - to play on the thing. But my ideas
shouldn’t have gotten in the way of what my daughter thought would be fun. When we parents tell our kids how to play, we’re
not letting them grow as their own people with their own memories. They can’t develop their own sense of pride
and “look what I did” when we do everything for them.
Instead, let’s give
our kids the tools to create their childhood.
Give them a blanket, some string, and a sandwich; step back and let them imagine.
No comments:
Post a Comment