From feeding the flowerbeds to producing great vegetables to giving seedlings the right start, Miracle-Gro™, America’s number one selling plant food is the essential gardening tool for success. Children grow miraculously when they are allowed to play freely by stretching their minds and bodies.
Play to a child is like Miracle-Gro™ to plants. It is crucial to his or her development, stimulating creativity and imagination. Play helps children figure out the world, develop character, and improve communication and language. It also provides the potential for learning, when it is carefully structured.
Children seem to be in motion constantly—exploring, searching, risking, mimicking. How many times have you said when watching your children, “Where do they get all that energy?” or “They never seem to slow down!” And if you are a grandparent you usually say, “Ah, to have that kind of energy again.”
Children at Play
Unfortunately most of us learned to “act our age” as we grew up, and the result is that we have forgotten how to play and lost most of the vitality we had in our youth. Children at play are usually:
- Looking at and touching toys and equipment that have stimulating colors, shapes, and textures (notice how few black-and-white and single-colored toys there are).
- Being challenged to solve something, such as putting together a puzzle or
making the jack-in-the-box pop up. - Fantasizing about being something other than themselves, such as a lion or a firefighter or their mommy.
- Getting exercise, and therefore increasing their metabolism, by climbing on a jungle gym, playing tag, or jumping rope.
- Testing the limits, such as how far out on a tree limb they can climb or how much they can get away with before being punished.
- Exploring and discovering relationships, such as cause and effect (what happens when I step on a bug or drop an egg?).
- Discovering their personal power, such as swinging high in the air or winning a game.
- Creating new possibilities, such as blending two colors together to make a new color.
These activities renew energy—for both children and the adults supervising them by…
- Relieving stress buildup.
- Releasing energizing hormones and endorphins (natural built-in pain relievers).
- Creating an interplay and balance between the right and left brain hemispheres.
- Producing challenging situations and the satisfaction of solving them.
- Building bridges between people.
Be a Kid Again
Someone once said, “I’m still a little girl inside. I only got old on the outside.” What was most fun for you when you were a child? How can you experience what it’s like to be a child again? Here are some specific ideas to encourage you as you prepare to play with your children.
- Make a list of the things you enjoyed doing as a child. Take each activity on your list and plan some fun and playtime around it. Then do them one at a time over several weeks, etc.
- Enter into your child’s frame-of-reference. Ignore any adult inhibitions, turn them off, and discover how much fun and energy you can get by unleashing your natural instincts for free, creative play with your children.
- Make a play date with your child and become his or her playmate—really enter wholeheartedly without reservations and inhibitions into intense honest-to-goodness play.
- Think about the way healthy children go about their day, and then find ways to engage in these activities with them.
- Be like your children—no matter how old you get! If you’re too old to get excited, you’re really old. Don’t get that old!
