Lets play a game

The Toronto Star had an article today about the importance of playing games with your family. A study was reported which said that children who play with their parents and siblings are mentally healthier.

Give me a break guys!!! Now we have to know these things through studies. I grew up playing with house house with my sister where she taught me how to knead dough, how to make roti from that dough. My father played Ludo and snakes and ladder with us and taught me not to cry when I came down a snake after reaching 97 on the ladder. He bought me a ‘Mechano’ and taught me to fix things. My stays during summer vacation to my Nani’s house got me into books because she ran a school and every year new books came for the school library.

I am sure he had no clue that he was making mentally healthy but I picked up valuable life skills, which have come in handy when I had to fix a fuse or repair a leaking tap. My sister gave me the early interest in cooking which later became my therapy for stress.

It doesn’t take a psychology study to know all this. But to the breaking social structure and lack of joint families is making u8s lonely and our children don’t pick up life skills. Parents are busy making careers, work long hours and come home so tired, they have no energy to even have sex, let alone play with their children. So they buy laptops, I-pads and computers for the kids and think they are doing the best. Well, they are, in a way but kids are not playing anymore. They are either on their tablets or video games.

We put our children in expensive music lessons, hockey classes, and martial arts and think that our children are getting physical exercise. But ask a kid about his favourite time and they will say the time spent with their parents. That is, of course till they become teenagers. Then they are ashamed to be even seen with you. But that’s beside the point. Kids create happy memories when they are playing with their parents. Not only that they are getting life lessons how to be a food parent once they grow up.

The more time you spend with your kids when they are young, the more mature, stable people they will become as adults. Even when they are teenagers, don’t stop communicating. We think they are not listening, but they do and when the time comes, they apply the advice they so grudgingly listen. But first, we have to make them a part of a happy family. Only then they will listen.

Happy parenting!!!