Healing Play
I'm working on my third book, A companion to the Gift of ADHD: 110 Activities for Transforming Problems into Strengths. The book will be filled with activities that are not competitive and have no performance demands but contain within them implicit lessons that will help ADHD kids in particular, but any kid really!
One activity I'm developing is to help your child develop a healthy wince or a hearty WHOOPS! response. Here's a rough sketch:
Practice having your child make silly mistakes and practicing an exaggerated whoops response. Like a clown. The teaching of this activity is the “healthy wince”. Don’t waste your time teaching your child to be perfect. Don’t try to teach your child not to fail. Teach your child the healthy rebound – resilience. Every life will face disappointment, rejection, failure. You don’t want to teach your child to be failure phobic. Play at failing and making a quick recovery. This way your child won’t be tempted to make small dreams to avoid failure. They also won’t be stopped when they do encounter failure. This is the key recipe for success – big dreams plus not being stopped by rejection, disappointment or failure. The actual activity where they are encouraged to make a mistake could be anything from slipping and falling (a pratfall) to spilling water or dropping a ball while playing catch.
Right on target-I found that it is very important to have the child direct the play, and to not have the parent "direct it." If he wants to pretend that you a monster and to chase him (and if you're up to it..my son used this one on me alot) go for it! Oftentimes the imaginary play impulse is snuffed out by the educational system or other kids who think "its weird.." It is imperative that he have an outlet for the imaginary play that is so vital to his being. As a mom with an active creative kid (now a teen) I have witnessed the use of imaginary play morph into passion for intellectual pursuit and creative endeavors that are now more "adult" (i.e. film and theatre.) Plant the seeds early for the ability to sharpen that intuitive and imaginary self.
Posted by: Stephanie Vlahov | September 14, 2006 at 08:55 AM