The Playful Parent: 7 ways to happier, calmer, more creative days with your under-fives

Get them to collect up litter or debris like fallen branches and twigs. This can be made fun by putting a time limit on it – challenge yourselves to see how fast you can clear the garden together. The best twigs and sticks can be kept for playing with at a later date, and this promise could be used as a motivational carrot, to find for example, the best stick to become their new wand. We’ve painted sticks and twigs with poster paint before; they look marvellous. If you gather enough you could also make a tepee for toys. Just tie the tops of the twigs with twine and splay out the other ends.

Sweep or rake up stray leaves on lawns, walkways and paths. You can buy miniature versions of good-quality garden brooms and rakes for your little one to try to help; this will need careful supervision, though, as rakes can be a bit pointy and pokey if not used correctly. Or you could sweep up the leaves yourself, making it playful by piling them up into artful shapes or maze-like pathways for your little ones to enjoy. Hand over to your children the most beautiful of the leaves as if they’re treasure – they’ll soon be collecting their own. These can be played with there and then, or saved to use in an art activity later. Or set them a challenge to find the biggest/smallest/brightest/pointiest leaf.

Clear moss from stone or brick walkways which could become slippery. How satisfying for little ones to be allowed to prise away the green stuff. Let them use a small trowel or teaspoon for this. Save the moss for making a miniature garden later.

Children love helping with watering. This job is best done in the early morning or late evening, when you will lose the least amount of water to evaporation. There are some great lightweight mini watering cans available for little gardeners. This is a good time to teach children about where water comes from, and how we use it. Make your own rain collectors by using large, empty water or soft-drink bottles. Simply cut off their tops (where the neck of the bottle begins) and rest the offcuts on top, upturned, to prevent large bits of unwanted debris (or animals) getting stuck inside.

Weeding is a job that requires supervision; although many weeds can be easily pulled up, roots and all, by small children, you need to make sure they check with you before pulling anything up, in case it’s a plant! Rather than composting the weeds, many smallish weeds make fabulous shrubs and trees for miniature gardens. If the roots are intact as you pull them up, pass the best-looking weeds to your little one to plant up in a flowerpot, planter or small wooden container.

Give the children a mucky job that won’t cause damage to your plants! Discovering mini-beasts and worms is all part of the gardening experience, and collecting such creatures for investigation will keep them busy while you work. You need a suitable container (with air-holes) as a temporary base for the mini-beasts, some damp soil and a few stones. Add magnifying glasses and torches for the budding biologist. If your children find snails, slugs or caterpillars (or their eggs) on the underside of the leaves, make sure they tell you, so you can decide how to deal with them. My daughter adores snails and insists on making little habitats for them, but none of us are that keen on slugs (a huge pest in our garden), so I always get a call to come and remove the wee beastie if she discovers one. Above all, lead by example: show the children how to hold the creepy crawlies without hurting them, and that you respect them by always putting the little creatures back when you have finished with them.

Pruning and trimming is a job for the grown up, but depending on their length and number, the offcuts are great for play. Smallish, tender offcuts can be handed over for some imaginative garden ‘cooking’ – to be ripped up and stirred into old pots and pans along with grass cuttings, mud and water. Larger and more numerous branches and trimmings can make outside dens, or as the scenery of a small world setting for vehicles, animals or fairies.

Planting may well be a seasonal or infrequent job, depending on the size and type of your outside space, as well as your interest in gardening. You may have no flowerbeds whatsoever, so any planting will be constricted to containers. If you have a large mature garden with well-established plants, shrubs and trees you may wish to allocate a small flowerbed for easy-to-grow plants to be cultivated by yourself and your little one.

Quick and easy plants to grow with the kids

Here are some of the easiest plants to grow and look after:

Sweet peas: You don’t need a big garden to grow these beautifully scented flowers, they are ideal for a large pot or a windowbox.

Sunflowers: One of the best plants to get children started on. They are easy to grow and the seeds are cheap to buy. Children of all ages love them, and because they are quick-growing they keep them interested over several months.

Lamb’s ears: Children love stroking this plant’s soft velvety leaves, and the spikes of purplish-pink small flowers are attractive to bees, so ideal for a bug watch.

Snapdragons: These flowers are pretty and easy to grow. If you gently pinch their blooms they look like roaring dragons.

Marigolds: The blooms are vibrant yellows and oranges, and the plants are pretty forgiving if you forget to water them. The kids can plant them in pots or, if they are prone to forgetting to water them, they will find their own way in a sunny flowerbed.

Nasturtiums: Sow the seeds in pots in spring and the foliage then large orange and yellow blooms will quickly appear. Great for playing food games with, as the flowers are edible.

Tomatoes: Every gardening beginner’s favourite. You can grow them from seedlings planted straight into a compost bag or large pot. They need a sunny spot and a fair bit of watering, but there’s nothing like growing your own to encourage young children to try eating tomatoes.

Herbs: These plants are a wonderful source of scent. Lavender and rosemary are pretty tough, and both have purple-ish small flowers that attract bees. Rosemary can be used in cooking, and the petals of lavender can be dried and then used to make sweet-scented pocket-pillows or pot pourri.

Get your children interested in nature while they are out in the garden with you, and make their job the one of feeding the birds. You can very simply make a birdbath by using a terracotta flowerpot saucer or an old ceramic plate placed on top of an upturned flowerpot. Make sure it is kept clean and is filled with fresh water often – young children love to help with this. Providing birds with food, especially in the winter when the ground is frozen, is very important. Most garden centres sell seasonally-appropriate food to scatter on the ground, or on a bird table. You can also make bird-feeders with your children to hang from trees. Our favourite are apple- and seed-feeders which seem to attract most birds to our garden. (See for how to make this garden bird-feeder with your children.) The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has further tips for looking out for garden birds. Visit: www.rspca.org.uk/allaboutanimals/wildlife/inthewild/feedinggardenbirds/birdfeedingguide

Brilliant books for budding gardeners

There are some funny and beautifully illustrated picture books about gardens and gardening to pique interest and entertain you and your little ones. Here are a few of our favourites:

The Enormous Turnip – a classic folk tale retold by many and available worldwide in various editions

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss

Monkey and Robot in the Garden by Felix Hayes and Hannah Broadway

Ben’s Butterfly Garden by Kate Petty and Axel Scheffler

Flora’s Flowers by Debi Gliori

Eddie’s Garden: and How to Make Things Grow by Sarah Garland

How about singing while you do your garden chores? Here are a few of our favourites:

D’you know the parts of a plant?

(Sing to the tune of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes)

D’you know the parts of a plant, of a plant?

D’you know the parts of a plant, of a plant?

Flower and leaf

And stem and root

D’you know the parts of a plant, of a plant?

Lavender’s blue and Roses are red medley

Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly

Lavender’s green

When I am king, dilly dilly

You shall be queen.

Roses are red, dilly dilly

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet, dilly dilly

And so are you.

For more information and seasonal suggestions for gardening with children, visit the Royal Horticultural Society website at www.rhs.org.uk/Children/For-families

*change the action to sing about different types of laundry jobs like ‘hang out the clothes’, or ‘fold the clothes’.

*Change to other areas or pieces of furniture such as the banister, the bookshelf, the TV, the windowsill or the picture frame

10-Second Set-ups

‘The quickest way for a parent to get a child’s attention is to sit down and look comfortable.’

Lane Olinhouse

As a parent, you know how the concept of time radically changes as soon as there’s a baby around. Minutes can seem like hours when your little one won’t stop crying or refuses to sleep, and hours can pass like minutes when it seems you’ve surely only just finished feeding your baby and yet somehow it’s time to do it all again. Babies just don’t follow the conventions of time as we know it. As Catharine Kedjidjian of the website BabyZone writes, ‘Babies start life with a distorted concept of time: night can be day and everything is now.’

We are at the behest of our babies. We find ourselves asking questions like, ‘Is there time for me to get dressed before the baby needs feeding again?’ or even, ‘Do I have time to go to the toilet before the baby needs me?’ And the truth is, there really is no way of telling if there is actually time or not; when our children are babies there are countless days when we never quite have enough time to get fully dressed, or to brush our hair, or even to drink a cup of tea while it’s still warm. As parenthood begins, time is no longer our own, and either gladly or reluctantly, we hand it over to our babies and join the ranks of selfless providers and carers as per the tacit new-parent contract: any time, any place, anywhere.

‘While I feed my baby I can eat my lunch with one hand or pick things up off the floor with my feet. I have my hair tied back in a pony-tail – well, that stays put for days without any attention. You learn to just get by when you have a baby.’

Mum of two – master of multi-tasking

Carla Poole, Susan A. Miller EdD, and Ellen Booth Church explain on Scholastic.com how this early parenting is important in forming the beginnings of a baby’s understanding of time:

‘A multitude of nurturing moments helps babies’ natural body rhythms and schedules take shape. Loving relationships are formed and life becomes a more predictable pattern of people, things, and events.’

As our babies move towards toddlerhood, time begins to take on a more recognisable and predictable structure again. But there is no concept of hours or minutes in a toddler’s mind; instead there’s nap time, milk time, nappy-changing time, lunch time, snack time, story time, play time, bath time and bed time. They’re grasping the abstract nature of time through the routines and patterns of their daily activity. They’re certainly not sticking to any clock, and woe betide any parent who tries to keep their toddler ‘on time.’ I’ll never forget my own battles at the sandpit when my son, then two, would clearly demonstrate that his time to play had not finished – despite whatever I might think. He just would not have it that it was time to leave, that the park was closing. He would lie down on his back, stiff as a board, refusing to budge. Ah, happy memories.

As Carla, Ellen and Susan point out, two-year-olds have all the time in the world; it’s us adults who never have enough. When your child is a toddler it’s clear that they are still in charge of time – and they can be incredibly forceful in deciding how it will be spent, and often frustratingly unrealistic.

The good news is that as toddlers move towards preschool age, they begin to understand the concept of ‘before’ and ‘after’. This can be very useful in moving the day along smoothly; we, the grown ups, can then start to be more in charge of time, with simple authoritative statements that include these concepts: we’ll play outside after nap time, or, before we have our snack we must wash our hands.

Preschoolers also start to get the idea of when and then, which is lovely for either reviewing the day, reporting it to granny, say, or using it to talk about the future: when you’ve taken off your shoes and coat, then you can go and play. There are lots of positive and playful methods of establishing rules and routines in the chapter Sanity Savers.

But what about the times in between the transitional moments in the day, when we’re not needed to direct, help or move things along to the next, or more suitable, activity?

When children play

These in-between times – when your little one is oblivious to time passing and is happily occupied, independently busy, involved in an activity – are like manna from heaven when we first encounter them. And it’s in these moments we discover that, while they still need subtle supervision, our children really don’t need us to entertain them, or to be involved. This begins very early on, even when our children are babies, as parenting expert Janet Lansbury discovered with her three-month-old baby.

‘I placed her on her back on a blanket near me and watched. My needy, vocal baby, the one I’d been entertaining and engaging almost every moment she was awake, spent nearly two hours in this position, peaceful and content. She knew I was there, shot an occasional glance my direction, but didn’t seem to need a thing from me except, perhaps, my appreciative presence. And, oh, I was beyond appreciative.’

On her website (www.janetlansbury.com) Janet has beautiful video footage of babies happily playing on their own, playing with their toes, just looking around them or at something close-up, or happily reaching out and making efforts to get toys and objects, for much longer than we might think possible.

As a child grows into a toddler and preschooler he or she becomes increasingly capable of entering this zone, and for longer, where they find their flow; they are busy, they are concentrating on something with an impressively long attention span; they are playing independently. When we see this ‘magic’ happening we are often tempted to watch and marvel at their brilliance, and for some parents it’s very tricky not to interrupt them – albeit unintentionally. But also, it may occur to us that we might be able to take advantage of this little bit of freedom. If we simply let the children carry on playing, maybe we could make that quick phone call? Or read the newspaper for a minute? But as writer Lane Olinhouse points out, it seems the moment we sit down and look comfortable (or equivalent) we suddenly have the undivided attention of our child.

Sometimes, young children can’t help but to tune in to us and what we’re doing, the moment we think they’re immersed enough for us to tackle that chore or dash off that email. For every time we successfully step away and achieve something while they’re playing, there are many times when our little one is suddenly round our feet, needing us right now, when we were quite invisible to them just seconds before. And flag up to a toddler that you need them to ‘just wait a minute’ while you finish fixing the TV remote, or applying for a new car tax disc and you’re usually on a hiding to nothing. They need help to find their flow again, and it is on these occasions when 10-second set-ups can save the day.

Can young children really wait?

It seems not all young children challenge their parents in this way. Pamela Druckerman, author of French Children Don’t Throw Food has discovered that Parisian children definitely know how to ‘wait’. They are simply told to do so by their parents and teachers from very early on in their lives, and they apparently learn this skill rather successfully, developing the self-control and resourcefulness to self-distract until the waiting is done. By doing this, French children have earned themselves a reputation for being a tantrum-free, non-clingy and independent lot. This strict, no-nonsense tactic of simply being absolutely authoritative in stating when children need to wait clearly works for French parents, but to me it seems rather unnecessarily brutal. It also encourages unwanted behaviour, known in France as ‘betises’, which are basically the times when children are ‘getting up to no good’. According to Druckerman, in France this is apparently a common and almost expected side-effect of getting children to wait.

Fortunately, it is possible to help young children learn not just to wait, but how to wait – how to find their flow again – by tapping into their intrinsic desire to be busy, productive and playful. We can guide them back to independent play by using gentle, simple and playful methods. Being able to find something to do – something that is constructive, calm and absorbing – is a highly useful skill that can stay with toddlers right through childhood and into adulthood. Knowing our children have this skill means we parents can get the space we need should we wish to do something for ourselves (without wondering if our child is ‘getting up to no good’) even if it’s just sitting down and collecting our thoughts for a minute or two.

So, my second way to play is about helping toddlers and preschoolers find their flow of independent play again; when we need them to amuse themselves constructively while we get on with something else.

TV or not TV? That is the question . . .

Of course, a very tempting way to get young children to wait – to be quickly absorbed, quiet and captivated – is to plonk them down in front of the TV, or, if we’re out and about, by handing over our smartphone or iPad. And the truth is this tactic will usually work like a dream; our children become quiet, still and occupied, giving us that much-needed downtime or the opportunity to complete a task that needs adult-only attention. But problems will arise if we rely too much on the screen as a babysitter.

When the TV is constantly on, often it becomes just something in the background to our little ones, even if it is set to a channel showing programmes aimed at them. They either end up ignoring the screen in the corner all together – and so it loses its power as an attention-grabber or babysitter – or they become totally addicted to it. It is a drug, after all.

Where a generation ago nearly all preschool programming was limited to certain times of the day (and was advert-free), now there’s TV for tots around the clock. Turning it off can be a real battle because there are no longer any natural breaks, not least because we are always shown what will be on next to keep our little ones tuned in. Apps and computer games are the same – there’s no sense of them ever ending, you can simply ‘play’ the games again and again.

In a recent Yale Family Television Research study teachers described children who watched excessive amounts of TV as less imaginative, less cooperative, less enthusiastic about learning and less happy as those children who watched little or no TV. The reason being that by watching too much TV or playing with computer games too often, children may eventually find it difficult to keep themselves busy at play in the real world, and might lose their natural creativity. Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, explains that in the first few years of childhood, genuine interactive first-hand experiences are much more important than technological toys. She quotes Dr David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family, ‘If we orientate our kids to screens so early in their lives, we risk making media their automatic default activity.’ Whatever your App says it can do for your child’s learning, it cannot provide the real-life, hands-on activities that are so important for young children’s healthy development – it’s how they learn about the world around them. A hands-on approach to toddler learning beats high-tech hands down.

From a physical perspective, too much TV watching and playing computer games can drain a little one’s naturally high energy levels, making them far too sedentary. Physical play is very important to toddler growth; it builds strong muscles and helps children discover what their bodies can do. Small children naturally want to run, jump and climb, but as Sue Palmer suggests, too much screen time may result in them becoming sluggish, frustrated or fractious. She also cites some research in Scotland showing that three-year-olds weigh more than their counterparts of twenty-five years ago because physical activity levels have dropped off so dramatically.

I’m not saying that a little TV watching or a short time on screen-based activities can’t be useful (in fact, it features in the chapter Stay and Play), it’s just that now there is so much on offer 24/7 that we have to be really on top of just how much our little ones are exposed to.

But here’s the good news: by having other, more playful, options up our sleeve, we can nurture independent play habits for our children as they approach school age; play that is creative, often physical, involves learning and is in the real world, in real time. As the National Literacy Trust tells us, encouraging independent play is much more beneficial to toddler and preschool learning than anything our children will see on screen.