At the weekend, I found myself at the playground. I’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours at the playground, though not recently. We’ve always lived in small, urban apartments and houses, which makes it both easy and necessary to go out a lot, especially with small children. When nothing more exciting presented itself, we’d walk to the local playground, sometimes as a reward or encouragement for the kids’ tolerance of other errands.
There were often friends there, it was free and good exercise, and if we got cold and wet it was quick to go home. I remember once setting aside time to find out how long my three-year-old really wanted to be pushed on the swing; the answer was, after nearly an hour, still longer than I was willing to push him.
It didn’t make me nostalgic, to be back at a playground. (I was just parking my bike and waiting for a friend in the park.) I could hear in the voices of parents and children that at midmorning they’d already been up for hours, probably had lunch when I was having breakfast.
I could hear great parenting: soothing, encouraging, distracting, all the work of raising the next generation to be both courageous and considerate, robust and sensitive and also ideally not with someone else’s banana in their hair. I thought how glad I was to be about to finish my sentences over coffee and then go to yoga without a flicker of guilt or obligation, one child going about his adult life in another city and the other studying at home.
I thought about all the lessons I learned in playgrounds. Wherever we went in the world, we ended up in the playground; I remember my husband musing about whether it had really been worth joining my work trip to Quebec to go on the swings, and I remember the relief of finding a playground in Paris just when the day was getting hard.
Yes, was the answer, it was worth it, because the adults at the playground can talk to other adults while the children learn not to push each other off the slide. Because the kids show you that the barriers of language and culture mean nothing at the top of the climbing frame while their parents give you invaluable local knowledge.
Because wherever they go to school and wherever their parents work, at the playground no one’s paying and the hierarchies are different – not absent, because some neighbourhoods are wealthier than others and most playgrounds are inaccessible to children with disabilities, but difference is also enlightening.
I remembered realising that we probably wouldn’t know the last time we went to the playground, the same way you don’t know the last time you fasten your child’s coat for them or brush their hair (and then being charmed when the older one was still willing to accompany the younger on the zip wire well into his teens).
[ When children grow up: the hardest change of allOpens in new window ]
The best thing I remembered was advice from a friend who was a professor of psychology as well as the mother of twins: don’t tell your child to be careful, or not to fall. They are being careful. They’re not planning to fall. Instead, stand ready to catch and say what good balance you have, how strong your legs are, what a big step you can take. You’re still encouraging your child’s close attention to where they are and what they’re doing, but building confidence rather than self-doubt, sharing your own delight in the growing strength of their body.
Sometimes I had to take a deep breath while I swallowed one utterance and composed the better one, sometimes I had my arms outstretched and braced as I said it, but it was always the right thing to do.
[ Eleven ways to let teenagers take healthy, positive risksOpens in new window ]
Like most constructive parenting, the principle and practice work in other aspects of life. Later, managing a team, it came naturally to support and encourage people reaching the top of metaphorical climbing frames.
In some of the more difficult phases of parenting teenagers, I remembered: I’m glad you have the confidence to travel around town on your own; I like seeing you developing your own style; it’s great that you can manage your own homework now. The habit of praise made it easier for both sides when it was time to say no, whether that was to banana in another child’s hair or underage drinking.
