How do you play with your children?

There was a piece on the BBC today about how a lot of parents find it difficult to play with their children – or to find the time to play with their children. Playing outside, playing inside, playing with each other, playing independently, playing with parents… Early childhood is all about playing.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a bit recently.

When you have two children reasonably close in age, I think you can end up relying on them to play with each other. They do play together a lot, of course, which is lovely (apart from the times they get into disputes over ownership of toys, or who’s first, or best, or strongest…), but they do need time with us, too.

Chris and I do a lot of reading to the girls – bedtime in our household lasts up to and sometimes longer than two hours, with both girls having a few stories with me, then LaLa having stories with Chris while I read to RoRo, then I get to take the dog out while Chris reads to RoRo (they’re on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows now and RoRo is wondering what they’ll move on to next). We love reading to them and sharing the joy and wonder that books bring and that is probably our preferred shared activity (definitely mine).

Next up for me is probably baking, though it actually often turns out less fun than I think it will, because there are bits that they don’t want to do or can’t do and they get bored or fed up. Chris did some cooking with LaLa recently, which went really well, because it involved her in pretty much every single stage (he got some ideas from the CBeebies I Can Cook website). He also does gardening things with the girls, though I think sometimes that can lead to similar frustrations as my baking.

Yesterday morning, though, it struck me that I’m probably not playing enough with LaLa. She tends to get up at least an hour before RoRo, often two hours before, so we have a big chunk of time. I’m afraid I had got into bad habits – letting her watch things on the netbook, until it broke, and then on the phone. I then started sometimes going up to the office for a bit, so she could watch Netflix (they’re both watching it now, in fact, but with a limit that means I’m going to run out of time to write this post any minute now) and I got to catch up on blogs and Facebook and Pinterest…

Fortunately, since clearly I’m not very good at being sensible about TV time, LaLa gets bored with TV quite quickly and wants to… wait for it… play! She plays quite a bit on her own – I think a lot more than RoRo did at that age, but may just be remembering wrong – but she has taken to asking me to play with her in the mornings. And I’m sorry to say that I’ve been resenting it. Usually, I get to sit and read my book for a bit, or doze on the sofa if she’s woken up hideously early (4.30 the other morning), or even empty the dishwasher and put some washing on.

At the moment, her favoured game is ‘playing with the house’ – the house being Happyland Rose Cottage and we play with one Happyland boy and one Lego Duplo girl. We swap round who is the boy and who is the girl. Sometimes the girl is Supergirl and rescues the boy from the top of the house. Sometimes one of them comes to visit and they have dinner (sausages, potatoes and carrots). Sometimes they watch TV together and dance to the music. Sometimes one of them is the parent and the other one brushes their teeth, has a bath, gets in pyjamas and goes to bed – and then is woken up 5 seconds later with shouts of ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’ When I’m in a good playing mood, I might introduce a tiger or a dragon and they might have some more exciting adventures, which will make LaLa giggle.

It’s actually good fun for both of us and is creative and imaginative. So why do I try and persuade her to play something else instead of jumping at the chance to play fun things with my youngest daughter? Why do I suggest reading her books instead or, God forbid, ‘watching something’? I think it might be the repetitiveness of this kind of play. Having to make sausages potatoes and carrots ten times in half an hour can get a bit dull for a grown-up. Just like we can fed up with reading the same book again and again and again. When RoRo was this age, I played lots with her – mostly imaginative play, rather than small-world play it seems, so just because LaLa has a big sister to do that kind of play with, doesn’t mean I should step back completely.

But I think I need a bit of a kick up the backside to get me back into playing with LaLa in the morning instead of steering her towards independent play or TV. Just because she’s good at independent play, doesn’t mean she doesn’t need to play with me, too.

Do you play with your children much? What types of play do you prefer? Are there some types of play that you avoid and leave to siblings or nursery schools?