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Dr. Laura Markham is the founder of AhaParenting.com and author of
Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How To Stop Yelling and Start Connecting and Peaceful Parent, Happy Siblings: How to Stop the Fighting and Raise Friends for Life. Her site offers a ton of helpful information about kids and parenting at different ages and developmental stages. Check it out at www.ahaparenting.com
“I give my kids plenty of attention. What’s so special about Special Time?” – Emilee
“Giving your child Special Time is an active form of listening, in which your child’s play becomes her vehicle for telling you about her life and perceptions.” – Patty Wipfler
“Special time is priceless because it symbolizes the parent’s unconditional love for the child.” – B.J. Howard
Every parent I know who has started doing Special Time with his or her child has told me that they see significant changes in their child’s behavior. Parents often say that their child seems to respond to it as if they’ve been missing an essential nutrient. In a way, they have.
Why? Because Special Time heals the upsets and disconnections of daily modern life. We live in a stressful culture that disconnects us from each other, from our feelings, and from our own inner wisdom.
Special Time is the antidote for parents and children, because it:
- Reconnects us with our child after the separations and struggles of everyday life, so she’s happier and more cooperative.
- Gives the child the essential–but unfortunately so often elusive–experience of the parent’s full, attentive, loving presence.
- Gives the child a safe place to play out the everyday issues that all kids need to work through, such as feeling powerless, by reversing the roles and letting the child lead.
- GIves the child a regular opportunity to express scary feelings and ideas to a compassionate, trusted adult who will listen and help her work them through using her own natural language: Play.
- Deepens our empathy for our child so we can stay more compassionate and see things from his point of view, which strengthens the connection and our parenting.
- Builds a foundation of trust and partnership between parent and child which is a precondition for him to trust us with his big feelings when he’s upset (as opposed to him lashing out.)
- Convinces the child on a primal level that she is central to the parent, that she really matters, that she is important. (You know she is, but often she doesn’t.)
Every child benefits from Special Time to reconnect with each parent on a regular basis. How often? At the risk of sounding like your dentist telling you to floss, every day would be fantastic — but once a week is substantially better than never!
Think of Special Time as preventive maintenance to keep things on track in your family. And if you’re having issues with your child, it’s the first thing to change. Often, it’s the only thing you need to change.
How do you do it? Ten tips.
1. Announce that you want to have special time with each child for ten minutes a day, as often as you can. Call it by the most special name there is — your child’s name. So in your house it might be Talia time and Michael time.
2. Choose a time when any other children are being looked after by someone else (unless they are old enough to stay occupied with something.) If you have more than one child, you’ll want to set up a schedule so all siblings know their special time is coming soon. One good strategy for siblings as you do time with one child is books-on-audio, which absorbs their attention enough to keep them from noticing you laughing with their sibling. (Headphones are essential, and if they need something to do with their hands, give them drawing materials to illustrate as they listen. Great for brain development!)
3. Set a timer for ten minutes. Turn off all phones so you can’t hear incoming calls. Is ten minutes long enough? I suggest starting with ten minutes because it will seem like an eternity if you aren’t used to being fully present in the moment with another person. Don’t worry, it gets easier, and you do start to enjoy it!
4. Decide if you will also have other time most days to roughhouse with your child to get her laughing. If so, then Special Time is all your child’s to use as she sees fit. If not — let’s say you work outside the home and have limited time with your child — then you do need to reserve some time for roughhousing. In that case, I recommend that you alternate days. The first day, your child decides how to use the time. The next day, you decide, and you always choose roughhousing/laughter.
5. Say “I am all yours for the next ten minutes. The only things we can’t do are read or use screens. This time is just to play. What would you like to do?” or, if you are including roughhousing in special time, add “Today you get to decide what we will do with our ‘Jonah time.’ Tomorrow, I get to decide. We’ll alternate.”
6. Give your child 110% of your attention with no agenda and no distractions. Just connect to your child with all your heart. Really notice your child, and follow his lead. If he wants to play with his blocks, don’t rush in to tell him how to build the tower. Instead, watch with every bit of your attention. Occasionally, say what you see without interfering: “You are making that tower even taller….you are standing on your tiptoes to get that block up there…”
If she wants you to pull her in a circle on her skates until she falls down, over and over, resist “teaching” her to skate, consider it your workout for the day, and make it fun: “For special time, my daughter took us out into the cul-de-sac to roller skate. I pulled her in a circle round and round so hard and she laughed and laughed until she fell on the ground. She kept coming back for more. After all this laughing, we had a great night!” – Christine
Resist the urge to judge or evaluate your child. Don’t take control or suggest your own ideas unless he asks. Refrain from checking your phone. Just show up and give your child the tremendous gift of being seen and acknowledged. (If you’ve ever really been seen and appreciated, you know just how great a gift this is.) Your child may not be able to articulate it, but he will know when you’re really being present with him. Kids sense our presence and they “follow” it like a magnet.
7. If she wants to do something that she isn’t usually allowed to do, consider whether there’s a way to do it safely since you are there to help her. Maybe you always tell her that it’s too dangerous to jump off the dresser onto the bed, but for special time you can push the bed next to the dresser and stay with her as she jumps to be sure she’s safe. Maybe he has always wanted to play with his dad’s shaving cream but you weren’t about to let him waste a can of it, or to clean it up. For special time, you might decide to gift him with his own can of cheap shaving cream and let him play with it in the tub, and then the two of you can clean it up together. If you can’t grant her desire (go to Hawaii), find a way to approximate it (make grass skirts and play hula dancing together.)
Why bother? Your child learns that you really do care about his desires, even if you can’t always give him what he wants (so he’s less likely to feel like he never gets his way, and more likely to cooperate in general.) And since these desires will no longer be forbidden fruit after your child has a chance to indulge her curiosity and experience them, she’s less likely to try them behind your back.
8. When it’s your day to decide what to do, initiate games for laughter, emotional intelligence and bonding. That usually means roughhousing in a way that gets your child giggling. I know, it sounds like too much energy. But it’s only for ten minutes, and it will energize you, too. I promise. Favorite themes include:
• Power (“You can’t get away from me! Hey, where’d you go? You’re too fast for me!”)
• Rebellion, control and breaking the rules (“Whatever you do, don’t get off the couch! Oh, no, now I have to give you 20 kisses! Where do you want them?”)
• Mock aggression (Pillow fights)
• Separation and reunion (Peekaboo, Hide ‘n Seek, The Bye Bye Game, “No, don’t leave me!”)
• Fear (“I’m the scary monster coming to get you…Oh, I tripped… Now, where did you go? EEK! You scared ME!”) Be just scary enough to get your child giggling, not scary enough to scare him.
You might also tackle a specific issue that your child is struggling to master, by, for instance, playing school. Let him be the teacher and assign you tons of homework and embarrass you when you don’t know the answer. Or play basketball and let her dominate the court.
In all these games, the parent bumbles ineffectually, blusters and hams it up, but just can’t catch the strong, fast, smart child who always bests us. The goal is giggling, which releases the same anxieties that are offloaded with tears, so whatever gets your child giggling, do more of that! A great source of ideas for games is Dr. Lawrence Cohen’s book Playful Parenting, which has inspired many of the games I suggest.
9. Don’t structure Special Time. I used to call this “quality time,” but that often confused parents. After all, reading to kids, or baking cookies with them — aren’t those activities quality time? Yes, indeed, and they’re wonderful things to do with your child. But they aren’t Special Time. So I borrowed the name Special Time from my friend Patty Wipfler at Hand in Hand Parenting. As kids get older, they may request more structured activities, which is fine — but that’s why the parent reserves the right to choose the activity on alternate days, to focus on connection and emotional processing. So no screens, no books, no structured activities. Instead, show up and connect!
10. End Special Time when the timer buzzes. If your child has a meltdown, handle it with the same compassionate empathy with which you would greet any other meltdown (“It’s so hard to stop…you can cry as much as you want, Sweetie…I am right here”) and give him your full attention in his meltdown. But don’t think of that as extending special time, just as you would not give your child anything else he has a tantrum about, like an extra cookie. Special time needs boundaries around it to signal that the rules aren’t the same as in regular life.
11. Be aware that often your child’s emotions will bubble up during special time, especially at the end. That doesn’t mean she’s a bottomless pit. It means she feels safer with you after this time together, so all those feelings she’s been lugging around are now coming up to be processed. Or it means that letting go of you brings up all those feelings of how hard it is to share you. Often kids use this time to express their upsets, so it’s good to schedule a little cushion at the end in case your child has a meltdown, especially when you’re just starting out, or when your child has been having a hard time. When the meltdown begins, just empathize, and give yourself a pat on the back for being the kind of parent your child trusts enough to express all these big feelings. Once she cries, those feelings will dissipate, and she’ll feel so much better–and so much more connected to you.
What’s so special about special time? It transforms our relationship with our child. And since that relationship is 90% of our parenting, you can’t get more special than that!
Was this helpful? Email me your thoughts at jennie@jenniemazzajones.com.
Are you feeling like the daily struggle is just too much? Are you worried your child may have needs that extend beyond what you are currently able to offer them? Do you live in Central New York? If you are interested in learning more about psychotherapy and play therapy for your child I can be reached at 315-737-3094 or jennie@jenniemazzajones.com
Jennie Mazza Jones, LCSW, RPT, CCPT has a private practice located in Clinton NY, where she specializes in providing psychotherapy to children and their caregivers utilizing Play Therapy. Jennie helps kids who long to feel accepted, want to do well, and wish they could control their worries, anger, and behaviors, but struggle because they communicate in a way that many adults don’t understand. She also helps parents/caregivers who want to help the important children in their lives reach their truest potential, but are afraid to make the wrong move, fear the worst, or are just unsure of what to do next. Jennie can be reached 315-737-3094, jennie@jenniemazzajones.com and www.jenniemazzajones.com