Sometimes when my kids are playing, one of them plays too rough or in a different way than the other one wanted them to. Sometimes they will appeal to me for intervention: “I said stop and he’s not stopping!”
More often, lately, though, the dynamics have been shifting. In their younger years, I would jump in immediately whenever anybody did anything physical that the other didn’t like. Now, after a lot of observing and assessing and analyzing days that had gone Badly (with a capital B…), I made a hypothesis that the kids actually were happier to work it out slightly more than I was comfortable with.
I preferred the boundary to be a hard line: any physical anything that anyone doesn’t like, I will swoop in to stop you, full stop. To me, this was a clear line in my head.
But to my kids, they more often began to react to situations like this with fury at me. What I mean is that if one sib took roughhousing too far, and I picked up one kid and moved them away from the other, it didn’t matter how calm or collected or regulated I was, it would end in fury from both kids — the “aggressor” and the “aggressee”! Both of them would start screaming at me “they can do whatever they want! You’re not my boss!”, etc.
It confused me for a long time (like an embarrassingly many weeks, guys) because I felt like I was trapped in no-win scenarios constantly. If I made a move to stop one kid from hurting another kid (and it wasn’t always the same kid in each role), both of them would feel slighted, even the one I was “saving” or “protecting”.
I finally, finally, took a hint. I backed off just a little bit. To be honest, it was initially out of frustration, not out of like, great parenting. With a mindset/vibe (not spoken aloud) of “alright fine, if you want to tear each other’s faces off then do it I guess, I’m sick of you yelling at me about trying to help you,” I backed off.
I was surprised what I found. Their ability to engage in rough-and-tumble play with one another, and check in with one another, and devise ways to check to see if they are both still mutually playing, got better.
And yes. Almost every roughhousing still ends in one or the other getting hurt. Sometimes because of the other kid, and sometimes because of accidents (like someone ran into a furniture or a wall or whatever). And I am not just peacing out and ignoring them or letting them fight it out. I’m still staying close by, aware, alert, ready to help if and when I’m actually needed.
But they were telling me, as clearly as they could, that even in their frustration it still didn’t feel like they couldn’t handle it, or like it needed to escalate to a higher authority yet. They were telling me as clearly as they could that even whoever was being “wronged” still felt confident to try to work it out, a step or two further than I was seeing them as competent to do it themselves.
Ever since backing off one degree more, the amount of physical altercations that end with everybody furious at me for intervening have substantially decreased. My kids’ fledgling self-advocacy with one another, though still immature — as it should be; they’re not mature yet — is improving, bit by bit.
Kids learn things through play. And play isn’t synonymous with only fun and good feelings. Play involves feeling serious, feeling big ways, getting upset, being the person who did the upsetting of someone else. Flexing the executive functioning skills that it takes to stop an action in its tracks when someone has asked you to stop might not be instantaneous. Developing the impulse control that it takes to play in mutually enjoyable ways is a long-haul process. All of these metaphorical muscles get flexed during play — REAL play, play that’s sometimes messy and raw and frustrating, play that’s the actual work of growing up.
(An important edit that I forgot I left out of the original post: my kids are very close in age, 6 and 7 when I wrote this. This often doesn’t apply to kids with a huge age gap or huge developmental gap in some other way. Kids with big age gaps can find ways to play with one another, don’t get me wrong, but they’re both not personally working on refining/learning the same social skills at the same time — so they often can’t be one another’s “learning ground” for developing those immature skills. The big kid’s brain would be on a totally different social level than the little kid’s brain, because both are where they’re supposed to be — but not at the same place as one another. They need more support and scaffolding from their adults in those situations.)
