About us
My name is Soleine. I am from Paris but I have been living for the past two years in Cambodia, where I work for a health NGO. Growing up, my parents were quite strict and yet my happiest childhood memories were when we did play together. As a certified kids’ camp counselor (French BAFA diploma), I have spent a lot of time since my youth organizing games for kids. I am passionate about how it helps children grow.
I got married ten years ago to my play “partner in crime” Richard and then went through long painful years of infertility (which I shared in my blog Mama Nobody). But I am now myself the lucky mother of three boys, Felix (age 5), Mataio (age 4), and Zephyr (newborn). As a new mum I was terrified I would only know how to replicate the parenting style I had known as a child —frequent spanking and shouting included. Given I wanted something different for my family, yet still aimed to instill strong family values, I read a lot about how play could help. I have since been trying to put these ideas in practice almost every day with my kids.
For sure, I still feel I fail a lot — it’s a trial and error process and parenting is incredibly hard. As soon as you feel you figure out what works with a kid, they grow and they need something slightly different. But I do think the playful parenting ideas I read about allow us to regularly create meaningful moments together as a family, in the midst of the exhaustion from school, job, chores, Phnom Penh traffic and and daily stresses.
I would love to make these ideas freely available to as many people as possible, in particular in low or middle income countries where it may be less feasible for parents to purchase expensive toys, or where playful parenting books are less widely available. I also would love to use the “blog format” to do something books can’t do as easily: create a community of parents sharing advice/thoughts on what has or hasn’t worked for them, sharing both our (daily) mistakes and our happy breakthroughs with our kids.
- Sothea is my Khmer teacher who is also the father of two Cambodian girls. He kindly offered to translate some of these ideas in Khmer to reach a wider audience.
- If you or someone you know would be interested in translating this blog into other languages or formats (e.g. videos) to make them more accessible to others, please get in touch!
Beyond our own experience, for this blog we are also relying on serious research and tips from amazing books about parenting. My favourite include Playful Parenting, How to Talk so Kids Listen; How to Talk so Little Kids listen; Siblings without rivalry and the One-minute Super Dad.
