Little Known Psychological Trick to Spark Independent Play!

Wanna get your kids playing independently? I know that's part of the reason you're here because independent play, as I always say, is great for them and great for us too. But did you know that kids play more deeply and for longer with toys that they themselves have created? I know that's a gross kind of generalization. It's not true for every kid at every opportunity, but it's often the case. And there's a lot of psychological research that actually backs this up. Dan Ariely did some research with adults who had built Ikea furniture, and those adults actually valued the furniture that they built higher, they put a higher dollar assignment to it, than the exact same furniture that someone else had built. Why? Because when we put effort into something, we deem it as valuable. It becomes more valuable to us. I have found, my anecdotal research shows that the same is true for children and play. When children tinker with, create, do something that's their own, that becomes their own toy, they actually play with it for longer and are more invested in it. So I think we can capitalize on that and help our children to make their own playthings. And it's kind of this radical, rebellious, anti-materialistic or consumeristic act, even though I totally buy a lot of toys and I love the toys that are store-bought and picture perfect, but there's something to the things that children make on their own that has its own special kind of magic. And so, how do you make your own toy? Now, I don't wanna overwhelm you, this isn't a craft competition, this isn't Pinterest, it doesn't have to be beautiful, it just has to be something your child has made or has contributed to. You can do something like getting polymer clay, and I love Sculpley and Fimo and all those polymer clays that are basically very easy, very soft, they feel like Play-Doh, and you can put them together with characters that you can look up on the internet, pictures of, say, Harry Potter or Star Wars or just a princess, whatever you want, and then you bake them in the oven and they actually get hard. And the cool thing about this is that they're almost like plastic toys, they're very breakable, but they are almost like plastic toys, they're hard, they last, and it's magical for children to see that they can create a toy, that it isn't just something handed to them from someone else's imagination, but it's from their own doing. So my kids will play with those things that they create for so long. But you don't have to get that fancy. You could take old socks and stick or glue or sew on eyes and a mouth and you're done. Anything that has a face becomes a doll, becomes a toy, right? You can buy or paint over old little peg people, you can get them pretty cheap, just a bag of peg people to paint, or if you have plastic spoons at home, disposable spoons, get a bunch of Sharpies out and have your children draw their own faces on them. Stick their own hair on them out of shoelaces or wool or whatever you've got on hand. You could use paper plates to make faces to make dolls. You could cut out a figure out of a cardboard box, for example, and just have your child draw their own faces on them. I think you will find some fascinating things come out of this, and I want you to approach it like a social experiment, right, social sciences. How do children react when they have created the toy themselves? Maybe you've got some Popsicle sticks and you could just stick little simple puppets on them. Again, don't get fancy. The point is that they make their own characters to play with, or maybe they make their own roads for their cars, or their own bricks for a house. You decide what it is that they can make according to the materials that you have on hand. So your challenge today is to allow your children to somehow make their own toys and see how this influences their independent play. Don't forget to snap a pic and share it out with the playpandemic hashtag, and please share this with everyone you know who's home with kids, because it could really help them realize that there are many ways of igniting independent play. Often, parents tell me, my kid just doesn't play independently, and I believe that all kids can play independently. It's like their birthright. It's something that they have within them, but we have to ignite it, or not to dampen it, right? We've gotta preserve it intact, and if we don't, if they've already gotten dependent on screens and entertainment and adult direction, that's okay. We can reverse that through the tactics that I'm sharing here, such as this one. It's never a manipulation of the child. It's always about offering them a pathway to suddenly get in touch with what's already within them. So let's reclaim that independent play. Let's let our children create their own things to play with out of whatever we've got on hand.