2 years ago this realisation hit me: I don’t know how to play with children.

Just after Covid, my daughter’s school did an event in a public garden. The idea was that Covid had ended and the school wanted parents to take kids outdoors and let kids play. We went to that event.

As the founder of the school asked parents to gather children, most of us started calling names of our kids: beta, idher aao or hi, we are starting etc. But it was just hard gathering the kids together.

Then suddenly the founder of the school started smiling broadly, cheering, singing and gathering the kids. Lots of people in the garden started looking at what is happening.  And as parents, we were a little embarrassed. But in 2 min the kids came together in a circle. This is when I realised that I don’t know how to play with kids.

It is possible I had never known it in the first place. Or maybe I had simply forgotten ‘how to be a kid’.

And in the last two years, I have changed considerably. I am no longer afraid of making an ass of myself based on norms of the society. I am ok to climb trees with kids, jump here and there, and be more playful. Which a lot of times just means following the child’s lead. That has helped me become more like a kid again. And the journey has been joyful.

A few years ago I took my daughter to the pool. I wanted to do an experiment: that dekhte hai meri beti kitne der paani mein rehna chahati hai? So I took her to the pool with no end time in mind. It took 2.5 hours for her to say she was done and wanted to go home. 2.5 hours even though we were the only ones splashing in the pool, and there was not any other person in sight.

Today my daughter is 7 and she has always avoided swimming classes. But she is always eager to go to a pool or a body of water. I remember a conversation with her:

She said: Dadda I was born to swim!

I said: great. So do you want to learn to swim?

She said: no, I will learn myself.

And over the last 4 years of going, she has learnt to swim herself. Learnt not to be a district champion, or to have an extracurricular tied to her to get admission in sports quota but enough to save herself in a deep body of water. And she seems really happy with learning it by herself when she wanted to, and at the pace she wanted to learn while having fun.

This memory came back to me because I was talking to a mother who recently started taking her 21-month-old to the pool. And she said that in her society’s pool, both of them were the only ones splashing about. Multiple parents came to ask if she was ‘teaching swimming’ or ‘how they could put their child in swimming’. But when she said she was just playing with her daughter all of them went away. In the brief Bangalore summer when swimming under the hot noon sun is truly enjoyable, parents came to enquire about swimming but nobody came to splash with their child in the water.

A child has no particular interest in learning to swim. But a child has a lot of interest in playing joyfully without an agenda. And in that joyful playing, they might just learn to swim.

As I reflect on this and see so many parents going to the pool to enrol their kids for swimming classes and not to splash I think the sad part is not that we might have forgotten ‘how to play with children’ but that we might have also forgotten to just ‘let our children play’.

In this busy purposeful world that we now live in this might just be the tragedy of our generation.

Solving this is simple:

Take your child outdoors and just let them play. And if you can then be a little silly and play with them :-)

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