Hey, You, Get Off of My Slide
What should you do if other kids are being dicks on the playground?
You’ve dragged your child seven blocks to the playground in the hopes of being left alone for three-and-a-half minutes on a sticky bench in unpleasant weather. Just when you’re starting to relax and check Twitter, you spot one: A Playground Hellraiser. The kid who won’t relinquish the monkey bars / slide / seesaw in order to let your kid have a turn. Maybe they also start mocking your child. Maybe they start pushing your child. Maybe their eyes are glowing red. Maybe you’re seeing things. But one thing is for sure: Your precious “free time” is over. You feel you have to do something. But what? How, if at all, should you intervene?
Few things are harder to handle as a parent than situations like this. The drive to protect and defend our young is fierce. Part of what makes it hard, too, is that you often know, deep down, that your instincts may not be in the best interest of your child (or your neighborhood reputation). You want to march right up and tell the obnoxious kid to f*ck off, but you can’t. (Right?) You want to tell your child to fight back, but you can’t. (Right?) You have so many conflicting reactions that you’re either left paralyzed or you end up doing something that you immediately second guess.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all response in this kind of scenario — because, of course, there is no one right answer to any parenting question, and what feels right depends on you, your kid, and the situation you’re facing — I’m going to share three strategies I learned from child psychologist Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard Center for Toddler Development and author of the wonderful book How Toddlers Thrive. Klein is one of my go-to experts when I have questions about how best to manage gnarly situations with kids under five, and she had some great ideas on this one.
1. Before intervening, monitor the situation.
Although you might want to immediately pounce, take a beat to watch what’s happening and assess what might be at the root of the disagreement. Sometimes, yes, the other kid is being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. Other times, the kid is actually trying to initiate play — by, say, grabbing something out of your child’s hand — but not being particularly graceful about it. (I mean, toddlers and preschoolers aren’t known for their diplomacy.) You don’t necessarily want to admonish a child who’s trying to make a connection.
Often, too, playground scuffles resolve themselves on their own. “I find that actually, on the playground, children do tend to work it out if the adults don't really intervene,” Klein said. “What can look ugly can quickly turn into cooperative play. So they're arguing, and you're thinking, ‘wow, that child really isn't being nice to my child.’ And the next thing you know, they've worked out a way to both be on a swing together.”
So give it a bit of time to see whether it escalates or resolves. And by the way, it’s fine if it resolves because your child decides to walk away and do something else. Playground are opportunities for kids to try out different conflict resolution strategies, and walking away is a perfectly acceptable one.
2. Resist the urge to resolve the conflict yourself.
Sometimes, when we see our kids struggling, we think the best solution is to make the problem go away for them. But our children are going to encounter challenges and conflicts throughout their lives, so it’s far better that we help them develop the skills they need to handle them. Removing their obstacles only robs them of learning opportunities.
Plus, when we fix our kids’ problems, they may interpret our interventions as evidence that we don’t have faith in them. Researchers at the University of Illinois surveyed more than two hundred elementary schoolers for a study, asking them how they felt when their parents helped them and made decisions for them. The older the kids were, the more they considered their parents’ help to be a sign that their folks considered them incompetent. (For more on this, read chapter six of my book.)
It’s important, too, for kids to feel disappointment and frustration because it normalizes these experiences. I’m not saying we want our kids to be miserable all the time — but we do want our kids to understand that life involves challenges, and the one thing they have control over is how they handle them.
3. If your kid needs help, offer encouragement and ideas.
So instead of fixing the problem for your child, try encouraging them or giving them prompts or suggestions if they need help. The goal is to help them understand that they have power in the situation, too, through how they respond. You might say, You could tell them you want a turn, or If you don’t like what they’re doing, what could you say or do?
This is not to say you should sit idly by if your child is being bullied or physically assaulted. Your response should be dictated by the gravity of situation, of course — it’s totally reasonable (if not a good idea!) for you to say to another kid, “I can’t let you hit my child,” or “It’s not okay for you to act this way,” if something serious is happening and your child is at risk.
But if it’s a minor disagreement or scuffle, consider what you can do to help your child handle the situation, rather than you handling the situation. “These are moments to say to your child ‘I think you can do this,’” Klein said. They’re moments for you to empower your child, through encouragement and education, to manage icky social scenarios themselves. Because like it or not, those will be part of their lives forever. Once they stop happening on playgrounds, they’ll start happening at work, at PTA meetings, and on Twitter — or whatever new social media app our kids become addicted to.
If you missed The New York Times Well newsletter last week, I wrote about how smartphone use can harm our bodies, what kinds of symptoms to look out for, and what you can do to reduce and prevent smartphone-induced pain. Read it here. It’s also in print today in the Science Times.
