How can I use play to help my children with their emotions and difficulties?

“Teach your kids to verbalize emotions so they don’t grow up to be adults who shut down when they feel anything other than happiness.”- Open Minds

Whatever their age, our kids go through difficulties that can have real impact on their moods and self-confidence. These can go from the small (Felix losing his set of Pokemon cards) to the big (us moving to Cambodia, the kids having an extra sibling, having to accept other kids being faster/taller/better at football), etc. And sometimes even the small things can be big for the child! My son Mataio cried for over an hour every day for a month when he started school because he didn’t like the fact that he would be asked to take a nap after lunch…

One thing that has really helped me: identify the issues that are difficult for each child in order to incorporate these themes in play. Many of these ideas I initially learned from one of my favourite parenting books called Playful Parenting and have since been using them on my kids!

In general, using animal heroes and goofy fictional characters to play with the issues of your child is a great way for them to learn how to overcome their strong emotions through play.

• If your child is having difficulties getting ready for school in the morning, say “let’s play school, let’s play getting dressed and getting ready”
• If your child seems to feel that you are spending too much time with a baby or at work, include funny exaggerations of love and affection are a good way for parents to help. Say “I’m going to LOOK at YOU” — exaggerate with big eyes.
• If your child is struggling with self control and tantrums, play games about control over impulses ideally several times per day. These include for instance: Simon says, red/ green light, games with instructions such as “speak louder/softer, sing louder/softer, do jumping jacks, go faster/slower, hop on your left foot”, etc. to teach self-control
• Exclusion/ rejection feelings can also be acted out with dolls/stuffed animals. For instance, for a shy child, you can play with a teddy bear and make up a story about the teddy bear being too shy to meet a new friend.
• If your child is new at school and having difficulties making friends with kids who already know each other, play out situations in which your child is able to reverse the situation — he is part of the “old crew of kids’’ and needs to accept a newbie.

Playing with our kids on themes of leaving one’s home helped a lot when we moved to Cambodia

Encourage emotional literacy through play

We always want to teach empathy, emotional intelligence and kindness in play. Some ways to do this include:

• During the play, ask children what they are feeling, what other people might be feeling, what the dolls emotions are.
• You can also practice games directly on emotions. For instance, ask the child to make sad/scary/ scared/ face. Then, you the parent respond with complementary face (e.g. comfort for sad face, fear for scary face etc.) Alternatively, you can make the silly emotion face (e.g. anger) and ask the child to identify the emotion.

We asked our kids to mimic different emotions (surprise, joy) — still a work in progress

Sometimes, the emotional needs of boys and girls are different.

- For instance, for girls always wanting to play with dolls, make up a story of a powerful doll standing up for herself.

-For boys wanting to play with guns, you can pretend that the gun is a “love gun” for which shooting makes people fall in love with the shooter. This helps to move away from the narrative of hurting others. Or you can help introduce themes around calling for a doctor because someone has been injured by the gun, as a way to move out of any violence-dominated game.