Georgie Wisen-Vincent on Unlocking Our Kids’ Emotional Balance and Resilience with The Way of Play

Debbie:

Hey, Georgie, welcome to the podcast.

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Thank you, Debbie. I’m so honored to be here.

Debbie:

Yeah, I’m looking forward to this conversation and hearing more about your work and especially your new book, which I’m not even going to bury the lead. I’m just going to say the name of the book, but then I want to hear more about you. So the book we’re going to be diving into today is called The Way of Play, using little moments of big connection to raise calm and confident kids. You’ve written it with a dear friend of mine and frequent guest at the pod, also Dr. Tina Payne Bryson. And so I’ve known about this book for a long time. So I’m very excited too, that it’s out in the world and we can talk about it today. But would you introduce yourself to our audience, to our community, and if you can slip in there, kind of your personal why, like for being in this space.

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, I’d be happy to. So I’ve obviously listened to your podcast, Tilt podcast, for a long time. I will start off by saying I’m the mom to a neurodivergent kid. I trained as a play therapist 20 years ago and I have come into this work from the perspective of not knowing a lot about the neurodiversity world and then learn more as things have gone on. I came to work with Tina Bryson at the Center for Connection, her multidisciplinary practice together in Pasadena. And I introduced a play therapy team there. And almost from the first day that I started, I was saying, Tina, I don’t know. I had obviously studied Tina’s work in the books with Dan Siegel, The Holborn Child, No Drama Discipline and the others. I had just become a mom myself and I said, Tina, I don’t know if you know too much about how important play is in the relationships between parents and children. She said, of course I know, I have three boys. Like, you know, this is something that I’ve been talking about and promoting for a long time. And I said, I’d love to put together a parenting curriculum. It took me a little while to do it, but I said, we should put together a curriculum just to teach parents how to do this, how to play with your kid and enjoy all the benefits that the research tells us that play helps with. And so I wrote a couple of things and I sent it to her and she read it on a plane and she texted me and she said, this is a book. from there, things started developing. At around the same time, we were opening the Play Strong Institute. So I’ve co-founded the Play Strong Institute with Tina. It’s a training organization. We help parents, we help professionals.

We have a play therapy training certificate. We also have groups that parents can come and study with me, mostly virtually online. And they’ve learned these strategies that we’ve written about in the way of play. They’re called the Play Strong Strategies. And we’re really talking about little moments of big connection as you read so nicely from the subtitle of the book. These are little moments. It doesn’t have to take a long time. It doesn’t take expensive toys. You don’t have to have the perfect playroom, none of that stuff. But if you’re wondering, like, how do I do this with my kid? Nobody teaches parents how to play. I’m really thrilled that we get to offer the kind of a how-to guide that I personally have been wanting, which was out there for a long time. And so I’m so glad I get to bring the science of that with Tina to parents and teachers and anybody who cares about kids.

Debbie:

Yeah, it’s great. I do love that it is these little moments, these little, and you’re familiar with my work and differently wired… they introduced these little reframes, but these little tweaks that we can do or little intentions, things that we’re really honing in on can have such a profound impact. And I really appreciated that about everything that you shared, all the seven strategies that you shared in the book. Actually want to back up for a moment. And just see if you can define what a play therapist is. You know, just for what does that mean?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s start there. So a play therapist is in, in the U S anyway, it’s a licensed mental health professional who has gone above and beyond sort of that typical graduate school training that helps us work with, you know, individuals or couples or families, know, whatever you originally intended to do. And you have a really strong calling to work with children usually between the ages of about three to 12 years old, kind of in that sweet spot of like early childhood to elementary age school kids, and you go back to school or you engage in more continuing education because you want to become a specialist. And usually there’s a big hook for this person in wanting to utilize play and really understanding developmentally the important role that play plays for children as they’re growing up and developing all of their social emotional skills. And a lot of times these folks have a special language through the play. It’s not just playing any old way, but they learn really specific techniques to be able to talk to kids in a language that not a lot of other adults know how to speak. So they get to understand the mysterious magic that happens through play and they are able to reach kids and help them heal from difficult situations or even sort of work on skills that would really help them in lots of places that they go just by playing together. And so I’m really glad that you asked that question.

Debbie:

Yeah, I mean, I’m thinking about, you know, a long, long time ago when Ash was doing a DIR floortime. Is that a form of play therapy or I mean, is play therapy something that can be inserted into different modalities?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yes. So I’m so glad that you brought up DIR floortime because I was trained in something called child centered play therapy way before I ever learned about what neurodiversity was. So I went and did a master’s degree in play therapy, which is hard to find. There’s a few programs in the world. One of them is in London, England. So I actually moved from my home in Southern California. went to London. I studied at the University of Roehampton in child-centered play therapy, which is sort of an approach that’s derived from, when we think about the original play therapists, we’re going way back in time to like the 1930s and the 1940s in places like the Tavistock Clinic and like that home that we think of as like associated with Sigmund Freud and his daughter, Freud, people like that. So rather than becoming really psychoanalytic about play therapy, we use those traditional roots of like understanding that kids express things through their play that they can’t usually talk about. Maybe they haven’t developed the language or the communication skills to do it yet because, or maybe they’re just too little, but they can explore their experiences and share their worlds with us through play. And that’s kind of the techniques that I learned originally.

Then fast forward to me having my own kid and thinking, I’m going to be the most playful parent in the world because I’ve already learned all this play therapy stuff. And so I would go to be with my son, Jack, when he was around a year old, 18 months. And he didn’t even care that I was there. He was just setting up train tracks, like through an entire room. His visual spatial ability was astounding but he didn’t really want to play with me and I didn’t understand why. And that actually led us to, he was also not developing speech when we would have expected. And so that led us into DIR floortime too. So I’m glad we shared that experience. And then I went on to get more training in floor time as a professional after discovering it as a mom. And so I think I’ve taken great care to weave in some of these different ideas pulling from different forms of therapeutic play to hopefully make sure that everybody feels like it’s inclusive of them and the way their children play as they flip through the pages of the book.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. Super interesting. And just also then to say for listeners, so you are a play therapist and you’re sharing this information through that lens, but this is a book for parents. This is what we as parents can do. So can you talk about just that generally speaking, like looping parents into this because they may think, well, I don’t, you know, like I can play Legos or something, but you know, it’s not going to be therapeutic or it’s not going to have this big impact. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, absolutely. So I should talk about exactly what kind of play we should be concerned about as parents, not concerned like, no, now I’m stressed about what play involves, but like what kind of play is most important for our kids. You know, we break it down into three play types. One is like the structured activities that we get our kids involved in. We take them to soccer practice or, you know, they might learn a foreign language or they might be in chess club and all that stuff usually happens after a typical school, you know school day or a homeschool day or whatever education looks like for your child. And that’s structured play. And then there’s free play and that kind of unstructured play that kids, when they’re left up to their own devices and they’re off their devices, they might build a cardboard box into a fort or they might grab Legos and they want to construct something out of that. Or they may even be doing pretend play, creating their own stories and following those storylines and that kind of stuff. But there’s this other kind of play that falls in between those two, which is where they are kind of biologically wired to seek us out or to want to play with other people. And that’s what we’ve written the book about. This collaborative joining with your kid when you play is actually way more important than people really know, because our kids are wired to kind of say, hey, look, mom or dad, come over. You’ve got to check this out. And a lot of parents are kind of flummoxed about do I have to spend a long time doing this? What if I don’t like playing? What if my kid wants me to pretend to be like a football star or I have to sing into the microphone or I have to be like a dozen different characters? And what if they keep telling me that I’m getting it wrong? And so it’s not that much fun for parents to get involved in their kids’ play. But there is so much that’s happening developmentally for kids at the same time that we don’t wanna leave parents out of the process. 

We want parents to know they can be just as much a part of the process and they can start to see and understand their kids play in a different way. And we make it really, really easy to do that with, as you mentioned, these seven strategies and pictures to go with it. So it’s all laid out in a really easy kind of step by step for parents to follow, but it’s also not a cookie cutter approach. It’s not like, okay, if you’re playing Legos with your kid, first you have to do this and second, have to do this. Third, you have to do this. You know, don’t make this mistake. It’s not rigid. It’s let’s go with the flow of what your kid is playing. And then here’s some easy ways to engage with them, maybe in ways that you didn’t even know were, you know, interesting to your kid or lighting up certain parts of the brain or teaching them skills that might even end up helping you as a parent. It might make an afternoon go more smoothly after school might help you reconnect after they’ve had a really stressful day. It might gain their cooperation to be able to move into things that they don’t really want to do after you put in a couple of minutes of play. Like it doesn’t just have an impact on how you play with your kid, but how you are in relationship with your kid. So all of those things we bring to you in the pages of the book.

Debbie:

Yes, and you’re not overselling it. I’m just going to say it really, no, it really, absolutely. And I did, I did love the illustrations. They were first of all, just aesthetically pleasing. thought they were beautiful illustrations, but you know, with the little captions or thought bubbles. It just makes it so simple to really understand the dynamic and it was all relatable. So in your book, you say that play is a kid’s natural language. And you also said when kids can’t talk about it, they usually can and do play about it. So what is it about play, especially in the context of neurodivergent kits that makes it such a powerful, just way to access our kids and connect with them?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, I think that our kids are no matter what kid you’re raising, they’re all really wired in a way that makes them want to get more mirroring. They want us to mirror them from time to time. I know that when my kid was little, really, know, mirroring is a part of how we’re developing our earliest attachments to the primary people in our life that are raising us and caring for us and also helping us to figure out our ways of being in the world. And I knew as a mom, I wanted my son to be able to be as authentic as possible. I didn’t even know that there was a neurodiversity movement at the time. And I certainly wasn’t trying to shift the way that I played with him in order to get him to play in a specific way and to turn him into a specific kind of guy. I just wanted to feel more connected with him. And I noticed that when I started learning new ways of playing through his language, the way that he wanted to play, the way that made sense to his brain and in his mind, that that mirroring process, you know, when you just unconsciously start doing the same thing as the other person and they start doing the same thing as you and you feel really aligned and something’s clicking that he didn’t mirror me back or I couldn’t mirror him in the same way that I was sort of expecting that I would. But I started to notice a little bit more of a gleam in his eye when I started to recognize that play was a language that we could use to relate to each other if I let go of some of my preconceived ideas of what that had to look like or something. So I found little ways to kind of join with him and I realized, my gosh, I’m mirroring something else in him.

I’m mirroring the true essence of who he is when I’m realizing how important this kind of play is to him. And so it became a shared language for us. And I think that’s possible for any parent, for any kid. There’s a sort of biological, natural, it’s sort of a natural way that kids can express things when we’re in that state of mirroring with each other, that they just feel so much safer to show us things that they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do when we’re in a rush, when we’ve got to get them to school, when we know that there are things that we have to do as parents to get them to fit into a certain structure, to some degree, whatever that looks like for your family. And I certainly felt that as a mom. So when you’re just playing, when there’s not a pressure to kind of do it in a specific, I have to do the things that the environment expects me to do and I just get to create my own world and I get to be myself, then I think that communicates kind of a neuroception of safety. We’ve heard that term where kids can, it can fire up parts of the brain that wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed to fire up. And then we can see some things emerging in their play that they wouldn’t usually be able to tell us. So I’ve played with kids as a play therapist, but also my own kid where if they’ve gone through something scary recently, or if they’re going through a big stressful new change, suddenly I see it showing up in their play. Like when the pressure’s off and they can just explore what’s happening in their world, what’s happening in their mind, we get so much better access to the contents of their mind, what’s happening inside of them, what makes them tick. And so your kid might play about a fear of spiders or they may play teachers really been on my case lately and there’s a lot of phone calls home or there might be like they were ill recently and they might play about a trip to the doctor that they had to take or that there was an earthquake the other day. My kid was playing, we had an earthquake here at my house. My kid was playing earthquake and practically almost like going through the steps that you would take over and over again to just try and make sense of things that are kind of big and cognitively hard for kids to understand sometimes. So We have this, I don’t know, secondary gain by setting up a recipe for playing with our kids where they feel free to be themselves, that they can activate those parts of the brain where they can feel safe enough to explore things in this language that they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do. And it doesn’t just have to happen with a play therapist. It can happen right at home. You can see new things in your child that maybe you never thought you’d be able to see before.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of things that struck me as you were saying that, and that jumped out at me when I read the book was this idea of mirroring. I of course know that within the context of Dan Siegel’s work and mirror neurons and, and within the context of co-regulating with our kids, right? But you, one of your strategies is to make yourself a mirror. You share a story about a mom and a child where they’re like playing patch, you know, or playing with the baseball. And, you know, the son kind of holds the bat out and points it and the mom, you know, holds the mid out and, and they have this like shared, you know, unspoken communication that happens. And it struck me in reading that I’m like, that’s what I do with my kid over zoom right now, like even just a facial expression, and then I do it back and it is, it’s like, we’re just talking to each other and conveying that, you know, I see you, I get you, and I’m attuned to you right now. And so I really appreciated that. You said that the oldest evolutionary pathways in the brain are nonverbal. Your actions practically always speak louder than words when it comes to your child’s mind. So that really just struck me. I don’t know if there’s a question in there. Let me think. Is there a question in there? Or is it?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

No, you’re so right when you say like a lot of the mirroring that we do with our kids, we don’t realize that it’s part of a recipe for relationship. It’s something that we do. If you’re an empathic person, you don’t have to think really hard or it’s not a conscious process to switch on those mirror neurons. Those are the neurons in the brain that really light up when we’re relating to someone else. Like, I know what that feels like. Right. And so a lot of neuroscientists feel that these mirror neurons could be the key to the development of empathy. Now, I’m not here to tell you that empathy is just one thing or another. Like my kid would express empathy by crying when he saw somebody else get hurt, but he couldn’t articulate like, you know, with his thinking mind exactly why that bothered him, but he was still able to relate to another person’s emotions. And I think that’s what we’re doing when we mirror. But we don’t realize that that’s such a big ingredient to being more successful when we play with our kids. But also it’s a big ingredient to being successful as a parent, I think. And so the make yourself a mirror strategy is just if you see your kid doing something that has a quality that’s nonverbal, like there’s something that you could do back with them with your body, face or voice.

That could be that my kid’s jumping on a trampoline and I’m just smiling and bobbing my head up and down with them or something like that. Or it could be a facial expression that you’re sharing over Zoom with your kid. they have a big bright smile on their face and you also, or they look concerned about something and you also look similarly concerned without overwhelming them too much with too much of that emotion kind of thing. Or it could be a vocal tone. If you have a young child, and they come home and they’re telling you, know, my teacher told me that I have to work on this, that, or the other thing at school. And so you could say, I didn’t realize that, you know, that’s something we could do at home too, kind of thing. It’s something that if you pay attention, what we pay attention to also shapes our kids’ brains and minds as well. So the more we can do that, whether we’re grabbing little moments when we’re in the midst of our, you know, just everyday everyday experiences with our kids or when they’re grabbing us to play with them. I think it gives us more opportunities to get some of these brainwise benefits that everybody’s talking about in the research, but we don’t really know how to implement as parents all the time. Yeah.

Debbie:

Yeah, and I think it also just requires us to be willing to show up and be present with our kids. Like, we won’t be able to pay attention to what they’re doing or those nonverbal cues if we don’t just even, you know, and you say it can just be a few minutes a day. This doesn’t have to be that you’re spending all of your time, like, noticing what’s happening with your child, but making sure that you consciously and intentionally set aside some time where you’re just going to be with your child with no agenda and just kind of show up for what’s happening.

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, yeah. Parents have been asking us how much time should I set aside to do this, especially if I don’t really like to play with my kid or I find it repetitive or I don’t really know how to join sometimes without taking over a lot of what’s within us and the way our brains have developed over time is to be the executive functioners for our kids, which is great in so many situations. But in play, it can really trip us up because we think play should go in a particular way and we try and take over and kind of control or maybe teach things explicitly when maybe our better thought is to pull ourselves back a little bit and become more of like an active observer and a participant where our kid wants us to be and let ourselves be kind of moved around a little bit by them. They’re orchestrating the scene. They’re setting up a particular scenario that they may explore in order to build a new skill right then. And I wanna kind of get out of the way and allow that to happen a little bit more. So us teaching these seven strategies is just an effort to sort of say, if you see this going on in your kids play, if they say, hey, come over, you gotta see this and you see little opportunities, take them. It may take 10 seconds. You may stay longer. You may stay for five minutes. Tina was saying the other day, set aside 15 minutes after school, you’ve been away from each other all day or they’re coming back from a sleepover or something like that. Play can be a great way to reconnect after you’ve been apart from each other. And I love that advice. You can decide how much you wanna do, little dips in and out, or do you wanna set aside the time to, I don’t know, give your kids some quality time and top up that connection that they want with you.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. There are seven strategies in the book. We’re not gonna have time to go through them all. We’ve talked about make yourself a mirror. You talked a little bit about narrating to integrate, making a story, which is super interesting and relevant for all kids, but I think also for our kids especially. But the one I’d love to go into a little bit more is strategy four, which is dialing intensity up or down because you know, we have kids who can have oversized reactions or very intense reactions to things who might get easily dysregulated depending on what’s happening. Can you talk about this strategy and how can we play with our kids in a way that’s actually going to help them better manage or understand their energetic and emotional regulation?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you’re saying, Debbie, really touches on this idea that so much of what our kids bring us is coming from the bottom up. And so the brain develops in a bottom up direction, right? The brainstem and the lower limbic system is wired up a lot sooner than the higher parts of the brain that would help our kids be able to slow down and think and reflect on what they’re doing or even know what they’re feeling in a moment. And then when you also have, like my kid or like many of our kids who also have challenges with bottom-up processing or the sensory processing of what they’re taking in from the world can often feel like it’s coming at them in all directions or it’s coming at them way too fast for them to make sense of it. They don’t really know yet how to get organized and to direct the flow of information from what’s coming at them from outside in the world to all of the places that it needs to go for them to be able to slow down and make conscious decisions or even to communicate in whatever way they communicate with us about what’s going on so we can understand and meet the need that might be underlying the behavior, right? So just that’s a little bit of the background on how bottom up our kids sometimes expressions and behavior can be, which I know firsthand. And part of what went into developing the strategy of dial intensity up and down is because that can look like our kids’ intensity is either way too high and it’s not matching the situation because it’s way too intense for what’s going on around them. Or it might be way too low to match the situation. So I’ll give you two examples. One is that your kid is on the verge of a meltdown because you’ve been outside all day. It’s really hot outside. They just want a popsicle. And there’s all of this stimulation that it’s really hard for them to be able to rein that in and just ask for the popsicle, let’s say in a way that would be, that would sound polite, let’s say. Then you’ve got really low intensity that doesn’t match the situation. So low intensity would be like, I look, you know, kind of checked out. I look tired. There’s fatigue involved. My body is slumped or my core doesn’t seem very strong at the moment. I might even be kind of, you know, hunched over in the chair or laying on the floor or something. 

And in both cases, it looks like you’re not able to do the thing that I need you to do, or we’ve got to move. We need to get this math homework done. And instead, you’ve just kind of gone like limp spaghetti and you’re now sliding down your chair onto the floor. So high intensity and low intensity can be really tough for parents. my knee jerk anyway, or a lot of our knee jerk is to just say, stop doing that, or don’t, or no. Like we want to put a really hard and fast stop on it when in actual fact our kids do better with gradual adjustment and also making them aware of what they’re experiencing in the moment to whatever degree they can tolerate that. So dialing intensity is something we can practice when we’re just playing with our kids, when it feels safer to practice. We’re not under the stress of the main event where they’ve got to be sitting straight in church or they’re at grandparents’ house and the holidays are coming up and they’ve got to. They’ve got to look like they’re happy to be there, those sorts of things. But we’re just playing. So you’re taking out whatever they like to do and maybe playing a board game together, or you’re making some art, or whatever it is that drives their interest. And you’re just looking for opportunities and imagining a dial on that thermostat on the wall, like an old fashioned dial where you can decide to take them up a few notches or take them down a few notches instead of just putting a hard stop on something that they’re doing. So I’ll give you an example. My kid likes to, when he gets really into something, he likes to just like bang on a table, like with his hands. It’ll start out as drumming and then it’ll become like a lot harder and faster and stuff. And if anybody comes near him at that moment, I don’t know how they’re going to get drawn into that play, but sometimes the intensity can look like a little bit too much.

So the idea would just be to help dial that down a little bit, if that’s what seems to be what’s called for in that situation, by finding something he can drum on instead of the table, let’s say. Instead of the table, maybe I can bring you a couple of really firm pillows and you can drum on those kinds of things, or let’s do it together. And in that way, you can kind of guide. can say maybe you can do it medium instead of hard, or maybe he does need more proprioceptive input, which he might be seeking at that moment, or that would help him to feel more regulated. So really talking about sensory and emotion regulation going together hand in hand, because if I can give him another avenue and I can direct some of his energy where we want it to go, it’s a lot more brain building and it builds more sensory regulation ability for him to say, this is something that my body needs, where can I direct it? And I can do that within the safe relationship that I have with my parent, my caregiver, instead of just telling him to stop or knock it off or the things that we feel like saying in that moment, quite frankly. I know I do end up saying that a lot of times and wish I had an opportunity there to dial intensity in a particular way. And I could have built some more bottom-up skills with my kid in that moment. So I try to remind myself.

Debbie:

Well, and you talked too about chasing the why so and that’s what you’re just describing, like kind of understanding what what is really underneath and so that we can support that we can find ways to I’m thinking about those kids who are get really fully immersed, like their play becomes, you know, all encompassing and it really kind of can ramp them up. So kind of understanding, I guess, what the underlying need is that they’re trying to, to meet in that moment and then looking for other ways to do that.

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, when I think of that deeply immersive play, like that intensity might come out even physically at times. I know not all the time. Sometimes it’s just a real deep love and emotional intensity and drive that they’re putting into the play to the exclusion of everything else that’s happening around them, let’s say. But being able to insert yourself in sort of, you know, how am I observing how am I maybe becoming a participant? We teach parents how to be the narrator or to become a character in your kid’s play, which a lot of kids love. Other kids might look at you like you’re great. Like I had one kid I was building a Lego house with one time and he was like, why do you keep telling me exactly what I’m doing? And I was thinking of the think out loud strategy in the book. Like I want to reflect with you. This is a way that I want to let you know that I’m here. He was like, stop saying so much. But when I just picked up a figure, a mini figure, and I came and knocked on the door, he was like, that makes perfect sense. That goes along with exactly what I wanted to do. So sometimes we have more narrow windows with our kids for where we can actually fit into that play. But once we’re in there, I could use that mini figure to help dial intensity up or down if it’s seeming like my kid’s getting a little bit too loud or they’re getting a little bit, you know, too rough with their body or something like that, just letting them know what I’m noticing through the character could be another way of dialing intensity up and down. And we have some pictures around being able to do that, in pool noodle sword fighting and lots of different examples that we bring in with the book to make it really easy to understand and sort of make it, I don’t know, as straightforward as we can do.

Debbie:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So many, again, accessible examples through the writing and through the illustrations. I want to ask one more question: the word sibling keeps coming up in my head. So can you talk for a moment about the sibling dynamic? I’ve only got one child, you know, so certainly there were play dates that I was involved in when my child was younger. But can you talk about the way of play as when siblings are playing together, how does the parent fit into that? And then when conflicts erupt as a result of that play, any kind of, I don’t know, strategies or ideas you want to share with listeners?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to stress again that these aren’t things that parents should feel bad about if you didn’t already know how to play with your kid and you could have been, it’s like, I could have been doing these things all along. I wish I would have had this when my kid was younger or something like that. I don’t think it’s ever too late. Our kids keep playing all the way through adolescence and we should keep playing as adults. We should find time for ourselves. I say that, but then I know parents of kids under five that are like, Georgie, you’re saying crazy. This is crazy talk. Find time for myself. That’s impossible. But I do think having times where we can just go out and have a coffee with a good friend or be able to catch up with, I don’t know, some knitting that you’ve been doing on something or even be able to read a book, all of those things are ways that our play or our interests that say so much about who we are and reconnect us to who we are then become our forms of self-care as we get older. And even some of the ways that we play as kids, we can still see that showing up in our adult lives. Like I remember being a kid and I would play, you know, when my mom was, you know, cleaning the house on the weekends and my dad, they were cleaning the house on the weekends. I would be out sweeping the stairs outside next to this huge avocado tree. And then my sister and I, speaking of siblings, we would be playing about a family that looks after the house and we’d be picking all the old avocado leaves that were about to fall off, off the tree, pruning it and things like that. So when we think about play, it’s something that should last our whole lives, just like our sibling relationships. The interactions that we have with our siblings are sort of setting us up, hopefully, to have sort of a lifetime of somebody who’s gonna be my buddy that I can go to when things get hard, that we’re planning and organizing things when it’s like birthdays and holiday time, all of that stuff. We really, when we’re raising our little kids, we wanna set them up to have the closest, most caring relationships they possibly can have. However, it doesn’t always look like that. And a lot of times it doesn’t look like that. But we tell the story in the book of using a strategy called Think Out Loud to help siblings learn how to play together more peaceably. And the story is that there was a little boy that I was working with who was about five at the time who had a two-year-old sister. He liked to build with blocks. And while he was in the constructive phase of his development, he would get square blocks and triangle blocks and put them together and he’d be building car ramps and things like this. His sister, who’s two, not intent on destroying his life, although that’s what he believed his sister was really trying to do. Right. She’s trying to ruin my builds. You know, I hate her. She would come in and take that crucial triangle piece that would allow the car to drive down the ramp. You know, without that, that’s not a car ramp anymore. So she’d come and take it and she’d, you know, just be trying to engage her brother. She just wanted to be a part of what he was doing. And they’re at very different developmental phases.

So I taught this kid how to start thinking out loud. And what I would do is just very simple. I would just say what I thought he was thinking as he was playing. So imagine a thought bubble over your kid’s head and you’re practicing this in play, but it starts to carry over into those situations where you really need it, where it’s really gonna matter. I would say it looks like you’re building a ramp. you put a pillow over here. That looks like a landing pad for the car. No, it’s not a landing pad. That’s going to be the guy’s house. He drives the car underneath it kind of thing. So kids start to correct us in order to, we’re kind of melding our minds in a sense, but they’re also learning how to think out loud themselves and share what’s going on for them. And even like this boy got so good at doing this that he could then start to do it when the stress of his sister coming in the room would ratchet up a little bit higher. She’s coming over to the table and his dad is sitting there as well. And the dad could say, you know, it looks like your sister’s coming over and she wants to play. He’s thinking out loud about what the sibling is about to do. And then the kid is registering it like, no, I’m, building a ramp. Can I save it somehow before she comes over? Can you give her her own blocks? All of a sudden what was a simple play strategy has now translated into the dad being able to think out loud with his kid, the kid being able to think out loud with his sister, and the sister also learning at a very young age that we can share what’s going on in our minds and tell people what our intentions are. And that can save me from getting attacked by this older brother that I just want him to, like I idolize him. I just want him to play with me, right? So families can get more of these needs met just by practicing a simple strategy and play, which is so, it’s so amazing to think about play being like a training ground for like really eventually adult level skills that we need in life. How much better would we all be if we could all stay calm enough or regulated enough to share with our partner or with our coworker or with somebody who’s really, really upset us. Like I wish I could just, you know, not flip my lid with that person and be able to convey to them exactly how they made me feel or what I want to happen. And we can practice with our kids when they’re really, really little, but it’s never too late as they get older and their sibling relationships. We can come in when we hear them fighting and say, okay, it looked like you wanted to just have your bedroom to yourself right now, but you came in and you wanted to borrow, you know, the monster truck. You know, what are we going to do about this? So thinking out loud is not just a play skill. It’s a parenting skill.

Debbie:

So okay, to wrap up, the book is called The Way of Play, Using Little Moments of Big Connection to Raise Calm and Confident Kids. Is there one, just thinking, can we challenge or encourage the listeners to do something today with regards to play and their relationship with their child, whether it’s something you want them to notice or just something they can bring to their relationship with their child. What would you like them to think about?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, I would say give yourself a little bit of a challenge to just try, as I was just talking about, thinking out loud. Maybe you don’t even need to do anything different when you play with your kid, but just set aside five minutes, set a timer and be with them and see if you start noticing after you’ve listened to Debbie and I talking about this for a little while. Just see if you start noticing anything new emerging in the way that your kid is playing. See if you notice the way that their mind works and the way that they’re setting up a place that could be rife with ways that we could teach new skills or just being with them. We called the book The Way of Play because it’s not like a sort of manual that you have to follow to the letter because there’s no such thing as a perfect parent who’s always going to get it right whether you’re playing with your kid or you’re parenting or you’re responding to a meltdown or whatever it is.

The way of play sort of becomes a way that pervades your way of being with your child. It’s a way that we show up for our kids in a relationship that’s going to last them their whole life. It’s going to be a template for the positive relationship qualities that we want them to be able to share with others, even as they’re starting their own families and maybe one day having kids of their own. So you’re really just making memories together. And just start by setting a timer for five minutes and see if you start to observe your kids play in a new way without even having to do anything different. Just seeing them in a new way means that you’re showing up in a new way.

Debbie:

Absolutely. That’s great. So where would you like listeners to connect with you and learn about PlayStrong and all the things?

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Yeah, so we have a really lovely website full of resources at playstronginstitute.com. But you can also learn so much more about the book. We have a book page dedicated to that at the Play Strong Institute website. You can go to Tina Bryson dot com to learn more about all of the things that she’s talking about and teaching around the book right now as well.So there’s so much that we want to share around the book and a lot of that stuff is contained when the book comes out on January 21st as well. So check us out.

Debbie:

Well, thank you so much, Georgie. Congratulations on the book. I’m like I said, I’ve been keeping my eye on this for quite a while now. So I’m so excited that it’s out into the world and yeah, thanks for everything you shared today.

Georgie Wisen-Vincent:

Well, thank you so much for letting me come and talk about the book and also with you, Debbie.