If You're Not Good at Play, Try This Instead

I'm not very good at playing with my kids.

I know that sounds strange coming from someone building a children's creative studio.
But I think a lot of parents feel the same way and don't say it.

Imaginative play is hard for me. The kind where they want you to be a character, where the rules change every thirty seconds, where the energy bounces off the walls. I love watching them do it. I'm just not very good at joining in.

But making things with kids is different.

For me it's art. It's seated, slow, and hands-on. That's exactly where I feel at ease. For you it might be woodworking. Or a garden. Or a LEGO build that keeps growing. The medium doesn't really matter. What matters is that it's something you genuinely want to come back to as well.

When we sit down to make something together, I stop going through the motions. I'm just there.

For us, that became the treehouse.

It's been going for weeks now. Cardboard. Tape. Papier mache.
Layers and layers of something becoming something else. It lives in the corner of the room, half-finished and full of potential. We're not done yet. We're nowhere near done. And that's the point.

My oldest keeps asking when we get to the painting.

He wants to be at the exciting part. The colourful, visible, look-what-I-did part. And I get it. I really do. But the papier mache phase, the slow part, the messy and not-yet-beautiful part. That's where so much of the learning is happening. I can see it, even when he can't.

He's learning to stay with something.

To come back to it tomorrow. And the day after. To care about something over time. To invest in a thing before it's rewarding. To find something worth doing in the middle, not just at the end.

That's a skill that takes years to build. Most adults are still working on it.
And the only way to build it is to practise it.
Again and again, until the middle doesn't feel like waiting anymore.

A long project gives me something too.

I always know what we're working on and where it's going. The next step is already there, waiting.
There's no pressure to invent something or summon energy I don't have.
When they ask, the answer is simple.

Yes. Let's go.

They know they can ask me to work on the treehouse and I will always say yes.

There are a lot of things I'm not the best at joining in on.
Pokémon cards.
Tea parties.
Imaginative games where I'm meant to be someone else.
I try, but I'm not always there.

The treehouse? Any time.

It isn't just a project. It's a standing yes.

Because that's the version of you your kids get. The one who's actually there. Present in the moment.