Keep Kids Creative - Play With Them

JeanneSager — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:32:00 GMT

Who makes up holidays? I’m fine with the religious (Christmas, Yom Kippur, etc.) and the secular/quasi-governmental (Labor Day, Memorial Day, etc.), but whoever earned permission to dub today Hobbit Day and this Wednesday Punctuation Day needs to get a day job.

Of course I’m going to sound like a bit of a hypocrite when I admit today starts my own celebration of National Keep Kids Creative Week.

Author/illustrator Bruce Van Patter, is trying to keep the fourth week of September officially dedicated to removing the imprint of kids’ butts from the couch cushions. He started in the fall of 2003, and now hosts a Website full of ideas to help families who are stumped for ideas of their own.

I can do him one better. If you want your kids to be creative, get your own tuckus off the couch and let your imagination run wild with them. A survey commissioned by HearthSong late this summer found 62 percent of parents admit to playing with their kids less than an hour a day. One in six parents don’t even spend an hour a week engaging in some sort of playtime.We’re a bunch of lazy you-know-whats.

OK, I’m climbing back down off the horse. The air was a little thin up there. Some days, I just don’t want to play with my kid. I can only let a pull-back car loose to fly across the floor so many times before I want to pick up a book. And I have as much fun filling a bucket with sand as I do watching paint dry. Go ahead, play me a sad song on the violin.

Oh, but wait. I gave birth. I’m a mom. So playing with my kid is . . . . (wait for it) . . . my job. So we’ll be celebrating with a rousing game of let the toy car crash into the wall 50 times or so followed by a thrilling trip to the sandbox. Hey, she’s happy.

Bored games

Brett Singer — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

They're meant for kids, but sometimes I wonder if even they enjoy these dull gaming concoctions.

	Clue Jr.: When I was young, I played regular Clue. (My mother used to torture me with the cards in a way that has scarred me for life, but that's another story.) Clue Jr. is actually more complicated, and also less satisfying.
	The Game of Life: If actual life were as dull as the Game of Life, our nation's suicide rate would quadruple. You spin. You move. You do what the space says. You spin. You move. You do what the space says…Hm. Maybe it is like real life. Only much more boring.
	Candy Land: With little children, this is fine. But once they can string a sentence together – "Candy Land sucks, can we play something else?" for example – it should be time to move on.
	Monopoly Jr.: What, pray tell, is wrong with regular Monopoly? They even make different versions now in order to satisfy even the most media-addled brain: Star Wars Monopoly, Your-Favorite-Sports-Team Monopoly, Marvel Super Heroes Monopoly. In Monopoly Jr., you build lemonade stands, presumably because hotels are too complex a concept for young minds. In our house, my youngest seems to have lost the game board for this one, so he and his older brother were "making rain" with the lemonade stand pieces. That seems like a better use of them. (I skipped an explanation that in the rap world, "making it rain" has a slightly different meaning.)

There are probably more, but I have to get back to a marathon 'Clue Jr.' session. Isn't it time for school to start?

images: theair1morningshow, Amazon.com

Strollerderby : boring

Keep Kids Creative - Play With Them

Bored games

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