The Many Benefits of Playful Parenting

A Q&A with psychologist Tina Payne Bryson and play therapist Georgie Wisen-Vincent

On an intuitive level, I think we all know that play is crucial — not just for kids, but for adults, too. But why? How does it affect us? I’ve long been fascinated by the research on play among both animals and humans and what it tells us about life, about learning, and about sociality. Back in 2009, before I even had kids, I wrote a long feature for Scientific American Mind magazine about how play shapes development. Then, years later, I wrote another feature on the essential role of play in early child education.

So I was very excited when I got my hands on a copy of The Way of Play, a wonderful new parenting book co-authored by psychologist and author Tina Payne Bryson and play therapist Georgie Wisen-Vincent. It’s a book chock full of simple, smart strategies for incorporating play into parenting and why doing so can be helpful (both for you and your kids). Today I’m thrilled to be running a Q&A with Tina and Georgie about some of the key ideas in their book, but I do recommend you read the whole thing — it’s a quick, super useful read.

I want to be clear: This is not about adding even more to your (I’m sure already very full) parenting plate. It’s more about spending just a few minutes a day in a playful mindset. And because play-based interactions can reduce tantrums and other challenging behaviors, these strategies can ultimately make our lives easier, too.

Tina, you've written and co-authored so many wonderful parenting books — The Bottom Line for Baby, The Whole Brain Child, No-Drama Discipline, and more. What inspired you and Georgie to write The Way of Play?

Kids need tons more free, unstructured play, particularly in nature, and they also hugely benefit from parent-child play. Play is children’s first language, how they learn best, and what they want to do most. Play helps kids try on and process the stories of their lives, builds incredible skills like emotional regulation and impulse control, and allows the parent to know their child in a deeper way, enhancing the connection between them.

But, most parents think of play as just something to do to kill the time, they find it really boring, or they just don’t know how to do it. So, when Georgie, my co-author, and a brilliant play therapist, who trains educators, clinicians, and parents how to play, wanted us to write a parenting course helping parents find ways into play that did all of this and made it fun for both, I was excited, but the more we started talking about it, I knew it needed to be a book. There isn’t anything like it!

You talk in your book about the value of getting involved in kids' play — by observing, narrating and mirroring their actions, among other things — and you explain that this kind of involvement makes it less likely that kids will act out and have tantrums. How does this gentle involvement in children's play help them stay calm?

Kids are already calmer and more confident when they’re “just playing,” so it’s the ideal time to get to know them at a deep level and teach valuable skills. Playing from the perspective we offer in the book makes kids stronger, both mentally and emotionally. When we learn to tune into these little moments in a new way, play can be a catalyst for helping children deal with big emotions or prevent behavioral issues from flaring up in the first place.

Play is actually our children’s first language, which means emotions are brought to life, dramatized in healthy ways instead of acted out through misbehavior, processed and released much more efficiently in a “state of play”. Additionally, when we link words to emotions of the characters we’re playing, like in our strategy “Bring Emotions to Life”, where my action figure I’m holding says something like “I’m not sure I can jump that far! I’m nervous about making it. I’ve never done that before!”, we give kids emotional vocabulary that helps them have richer language to accurately talk about their own feelings over time, which helps kids have more agency with their internal worlds, instead of just being victim to their emotions and having emotions take over.

I'll admit, the idea of sitting down and playing with my kids sometimes gives me hives. You talk in your book about the fact that many adults really don't know how to engage in children's play, which... really resonated. Why is this? What can we do to get more comfortable with play if we want to? And how much time do we really need to be spending playing with our kids to reap these benefits?

We explain a few reasons for this in the book, many of which are just practical. We don’t know when it’s going to end or who’s going to clean it all up! We have so much mental load as parents and sitting to play doesn’t feel very “productive” when we have so much to do. Also, the higher structures of our parent brains kept on developing so we no longer feel the same way about tiny tea parties and hide and seek. And for good reason, because we need to manage all the higher functions of family life.

But we can also draw on those same strengths to relearn how to play. We’re not talking about doing this all day long, every day. We’re talking about a few minutes a day, a few times a day, or when it works or makes sense. There will be lots of times during the day you don’t feel very playful. Sometimes these are the moments that play is most needed, so you can push yourself to access something fun or silly to get you there, or, it’s OK to just be playful later when you are up for it.

One of your chapters focuses on the concept of "scaffolding" play. When I first heard this term in relation to play years ago, I didn't really understand what it meant or what it looked like. Can you unpack the concept for us and talk a little about how to scaffold play and why it's helpful?

Sometimes we don’t know how much to help our kids when they struggle. We step in too much, like unwrapping the string cheese before they even try. Or we don’t help enough when they really do need us. It’s resilience building when we step into their zone of proximal development (or ZPD, a term coined by Lev Vygotsky) and stretch their skills. It lets them practice tethering emotional regulation to executive functions, like when they are glueing popsicle sticks to make a house. One wrong move and the whole thing can come apart, so they have to focus while working under pressure.

Our strategy, “Scaffold and Stretch”, might look like being their emotionally regulated assistant and holding pieces of it while they work, or encouraging them at each step so they can do it mostly independently. “That was just the right amount of glue”, “You totally got the roof angle even”, and “You can hold your concentration a long time, wow!” are examples of specific things we can say that have a snowball effect on your child’s resilience. Scaffolding is about providing the right amount of support that allows our kids to try something successfully in a way that stretches them to do something they couldn’t do independently. Remember how hard it is to open a play-doh container? We could just open it for them, but then they don’t get the opportunity to stretch their skills and learn to do it autonomously. So, if we’re scaffolding, we might hold up three things and say “Hmmm. I wonder if any of these tools might help you open it?” And then the kid can try using a plastic play-doh knife to pry the lid off. Now they have a skill they can use on their own!

How can parents get involved in kids' play without becoming disruptive or overbearing? I have heard from play educators that parents sometimes insert themselves into kids' play in ways that end up interrupting the play or making kids self-conscious. Like if you say "Oh, are you building a castle?" and your kid is actually building a train, they might suddenly feel like they're building a really terrible train. How do we find that sweet spot where we are involved in a constructive, rather than overbearing, way? Are there any "red flags" that might help us recognize we're doing too much?

We have these adorable and easy-to-follow pictures in The Way of Play with steps reminding parents to let the child lead and ease up on commands, questions, and corrections. If you really feel like asking a question, like “Why does the villain keep winning? Shouldn’t the good guy prevail?” it might fall flat because there’s a theme developing that your kid wants to figure out. You’ll get no response or be told you’re saying the wrong thing – you don’t get it. Try phrasing it as an “I wonder…” such as “I wonder if the good guy will ever win” and your child will probably show you deeper, more meaningful themes about how tough it is when life is unfair.

A child’s brain doesn’t need to tell the difference between play and reality to learn valuable lessons. In play, kids can solve problems that don’t have an easy fix and gain confidence tolerating hard things, whether it’s in pretend or in real life. It’s pretty amazing! Plus, if we’re tuned into our kid, they’re usually pretty obvious in communicating if we’re being intrusive. If we’re really following their lead, they’ll show us when to back off. And, we want to make sure we’re not being too didactic or making play “productive”. It’s supposed to be fun!

You talk about the value of setting playtime parameters and boundaries. (I don't know if you've seen the movie “Nightbitch,” but this reminds me of a scene in which the mom is painting with her son and then he decides to get up and start painting the walls, and after barking a half-hearted "no," she just relents and lets him.) Why and how should we set play boundaries, while also ensuring that play remains child-led?

Even though it’s called free play, you’ll still need to offer limits that keep things safe. We have a limit setting technique that works like magic in all kinds of situations. Instead of just saying no, which is a hard stop, think of it as a “pit stop.” Your daughter wants to put glitter in the bathtub, for instance, or your son wants to ride his skateboard down the staircase. You could say, “The staircase isn’t for skating, but there must be other places you can skate downhill. Any hills your size when we head to the park later?”

It’s so much easier to bypass blow-ups and pushback when your kid knows you understand them and are actively looking for what you can say “yes” to! The way we set limits can also help our kids scaffold as well. Think about the difference between “stop it” and “can you try that in a soft way?” where the child then has to practice reining in their impulses and motor activity in order for the play to continue. We like to think about SOS when it comes to the rules of play: take care of self, others, space.

Is there anything else you would like to mention?

For the parents who don’t know how to play, or who find it excruciatingly boring, or who think of it as a time-filler that is keeping them from doing something important, we hope that they find these strategies easy to implement in just a few minutes a day to know, connect, and enjoy their kid. It’s our greatest desire that parents come to find that the way to their kids’ hearts, the way to their kids’ optimal development, the way to building skills that matter, and the way to having a deep connection to our kids’ that lasts into their adulthood, is the way of play. Because what kids can’t say, they can play, it’s an incredibly rich opportunity to know our kids, to let them process what they’re thinking about and feeling, and to build skills for the future.