Playing With Love, Not Fear

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a Wearthy podcast. I'm your host Lukas Ritson. Thanks so much for joining me.

I talk a lot about play. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favorite people who are advocates of children and nature and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated, and I think we all need a little more play in our lives.

Welcome to another season of Play It Forward, the Wearthy podcast. It's season two — we're super excited for our guest today! But first, I have a special guest as well. Our co-host today is a driving force behind the scenes at Wearthy, my partner in play, the mother to our two beautiful children, and the love of my life — we've got Vanessa Ritson here co-hosting.

Vanessa Ritson: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast today. I really couldn't let this opportunity go by because the guest that we're speaking to today has impacted my life as a parent and also us as a family.

Our guest is also a mother. She's a registered psychologist, parenting educator, best-selling author, international speaker, and a regularly invited media guest. She is the founder and director of the Wishing Star Developmental Clinic and has been supporting families and children for almost 20 years. Her passion is in walking alongside parents, teachers, care providers, and other big people to really see the world through the child's eyes.

Today we are going to talk about how we can support our children in their wellbeing, being resilient with change, and how we can guide children in the changing world. Please welcome to the studio the incredible Dr. Vanessa LaPointe.

Dr. Vanessa: Well, thank you. Awesome!

Lukas: Let's get straight to it. The question we ask all guests and start all podcasts with is: where did you like to play as a child?

Dr. Vanessa: I had the most magical childhood. My family was running a recreational property for our church, which meant that I had a stable full of 25 horses at my disposal at any given time. I would get up and head out the door in the morning as young as age five and I would run out, grab a horse — I wouldn't even saddle them up — and I rode everywhere. I rode through rivers. I remember getting trapped in fields with like a giant bull cornering us in the corner of the field and trying to have to figure out with my sisters how we were going to get out of this.

So I had this very kind of free-flowing childhood. I actually thought for two or three years that I possibly was the reincarnation of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My mom even sewed me a bonnet and a skirt so that I could play it full out.

Lukas: Sounds amazing. So how do you think that shaped and contributes to you as an adult now and the avenue you've decided to dedicate your life to?

Dr. Vanessa: You know, I think there's something about free play and free play out in nature where there aren't a lot of restrictions. We in present-day environment have, you know, placed so many boundaries around what play is. And I didn't experience boundaries in play — I just went and I got to be who I was as a little person.

Which meant that there were moments where, you know, that probably wasn't so great that we were in a field with a bull, a bunch of little kids trying to figure out how to really save our lives. And there's a tenacity and a resilience and a belief in ability and self that comes with having navigated the terrain of those challenges, made possible by living in the world of free play.

Lukas: You've mentioned just now that boundaries is something that you've really observed as has changed, because we know that today children are living in a very different world. And the last 20 years that you've been working in your field of expertise — are there other major changes that you've seen in the childhood experience?

Dr. Vanessa: The access to free play has substantially eroded. And instead in its place we've seen what we call play but it's not actually play. It's very structured, it's adult-led, there's an outcome associated with it — "we do this to get this" — rather than just just being.

When a child gets to exist in a space of boredom — not entertainment, but boredom — the world becomes quiet enough that they get to hear themselves and they get to become their own person. They get to figure out what that's all about.

And so as the scope of play, or what we call play, has become increasingly narrowed, and kids at younger and younger ages are forced into structured activities in order to "build up the resume to get into the school" and all of these kinds of things — we've seen that big shift happen.

And we also see the very devastating impact that has on the developing brain, on the developing sense of self. Peter Gray, who I'm sure you guys know — you know, as our access to play has decreased, we've seen a commensurate increase in the emergence of mental health issues in our growing children. And so all of this is swirling around in present day, and I think that's the epicenter of where change needs to happen for our kids to be okay.

Lukas: Are we at a tipping point where people are waking up to what's actually going on for our children today?

Dr. Vanessa: You know, I don't think any of us ever wake up when the invitation comes until that wake-up call gets so loud that it has dropped us to our knees. And we are on the precipice of that.

Even as recently as 10 years ago, the mental health epidemic was about one in five children — on any given day in my area of the world were wandering around clinically symptomatic, meaning their symptoms were significant enough that they would be diagnosed with a mental health issue were somebody to have assessed them on that day.

Fast forward to present day, the number has swelled to one in three. So we are very shortly, if haven't already, about to land on our knees. And we get to receive the invitation if we want it.

From where I stand, the switch — how we change over to a direction that's going to be so much better for our young — is to shift from being fear-based in the way that we are child-raising to being love-based in the way that we are child-raising.

The fear-based is like, "We have to do it this way and they have to be in this program and they have to be friends with this many kids and they have to, you know, A-B-C-X-Y-Z so that everything will be fine and they can live a good life."

And what about the force of nature? What about the power of development that has existed for all of time? What about just having mad respect for how insanely amazing that is all on its own, and getting behind that rather than feeling like you have to be in front of it and driving it?

Lukas: What are some techniques you use? Say the hypothetical — you have a family come in, they're completely void of this view of freedom and they're more coming from that parenting framework of the entertainer, of the organizer, the event planner. What are some strategies you use to get them into the love-based mode?

Dr. Vanessa: One of the things that I'll lead with — because I know it's about making it safe enough for them to see it that way — I'll say to them, "You're working way too hard. This is not what it is to raise a child. We don't have to entertain and we don't have to hyper-schedule and have them in every program and all of those kinds of things. We can dial this way back and just give everybody an opportunity to rest and breathe. And let's see what happens."

And then it's about shortening the radius. It's about creating a life that's a lot more simple. It's about making sure you have long stretches of unstructured time so that when the inspiration hits to play, you've developed a routine around that where your child gets to land there.

And as parents, just sit in it. One of the lines that I give to parents that I work with is, I say to them, "When your children come to you and say 'I'm bored,' just say back to them, 'I love bored! Bored is so epic!'"

And be prepared as a parent, because you are going to be swimming upstream. This is not the way that the dominant pop culture of child-raising is doing things right now. So be prepared as a parent to be uncomfortable with that, and to have the finger wagged in your face a few times about how you need to "get on it" with your kids.

And then sit back and observe the miracle of nature and the force that is child development at work. It's — I double dog dare you to get in the way of it. It is that much of a force.

Lukas: As a psychologist, what are some of the attributes or challenges that children themselves are facing in their day-to-day when they are restricted of this time? What do you see parents come to you regularly and say, "These are the problems I'm having"?

Dr. Vanessa: You will see children who are dysregulated emotionally speaking. The symptoms around that are going to be that a parent will call in and they won't say, "I think my child's dysregulated because of a lack of play and an overexposure to screens."

Usually they call in and they're like, "My kid is driving me crazy, they never listen to anything I say, they're always on their siblings and being aggressive." Or they'll say things like, "My child is struggling with sleep. My child has become reactive to every single food that they're eating." You can feel the sensitivity in the child's system rising.

And so there'll be these kinds of markers that reveal underneath all of that, actually, a child who is incredibly stressed, very dysregulated. And then we get to get to work on what's underneath all of that. It's not about making the child conform as much as it is about setting the child up in a world that works for them and not against them.

Dr. Vanessa: I'll tell you a story. When my son was three, he got very, very sick. He had asthma, and the combination of having this respiratory virus and his asthma meant that we were rushing to the hospital as he turned blue. It was a terrifying experience for him, just as much as it was for me to be watching my sweet little boy in all of that distress.

He hated being at the hospital. He was in complete emotional dysregulation around the event. And eventually we got to go home.

The first day that we were at home, I had just ducked down the hall to grab a basket of laundry to fold in his room where he was playing, and I came back in and he had set up a hospital bed with his little teddy bear and all of these little things that he was using as "medicine" — which he called "poison" — and he had this whole thing.

He did all of the triage that they do when you first get to the hospital, asking all the questions and taking the blood pressure and all of the things. And then he was acting out, in play, getting the medicine. And in the world of play, his teddy bear was this sick little boy and he was the doctor. He was the one that was gonna save the day.

He got to feel, through replaying that experience over and over again, the sense of empowerment. What if he'd never been able to access that? What if he'd never been able to play that through and make sense of it and feel in charge of it and get it sorted out?

He already was an incredibly sensitive little boy. Imagine how it would have lived in him. And now take that one experience and multiply that by all of the things that our children live through — especially right now — and imagine how the stress builds when they don't have access to the world of play. Play is their language. It's how they make sense of life.

Lukas: It's all well and good, and well-intentioned as parents and caretakers, to try to explain these things out and talk about feelings. But I think there's a huge disconnect in the adult mind between the intangible explanations to a child and then making an actual tangible experience.

Dr. Vanessa: We do a lot of therapy through play, especially for children who've experienced traumatic things. We have gorgeous sand trays that we work in and all sorts of different things that kids can use to recreate their lived experience in the play frame.

When kids are in their play frame, they know that they're in that frame for starters, and they also are able to kind of wander around issues and look at them from multiple angles in order to be able to make sense of what it is that's happened for them. So we use play as a very central part of how we work with children. So much so that if you're a young child, the only circumstances under which we would work with you directly in the clinic is through play. There is no other medium that makes sense to children.

Vanessa Ritson: We have two children, they're four and six, and we're starting to hear from other families that we know whose children are receiving developmental diagnoses such as ADHD and ASD. Do you have any tips for parents who might be taking the steps through this journey? And also, as friends, how can we support them?

Dr. Vanessa: It's an interesting thing to get kind of diagnostic and prescriptive about the journey of child development. And I am constantly at odds within myself about that, because I write reports that offer those diagnoses on a regular basis, and yet I'm not always so convinced that I believe that they're true.

I know that we work within systems where sometimes we go that route because we know that that's going to mean advocacy and being able to get services in place. And yet when I sit back and I think about what is it that children need for their world to go round, and then I think about what kind of world are a lot of our children growing up in — of course they look like they have ADHD and of course they look autistic, because they haven't actually had the building blocks available to them in order to have that go any other way.

So my number one message to parents always is: you are the expert on your child. So if you have any part of your gut instinct flaring up around all of this, get very still and listen to that. There ain't nobody that's an expert on your kid like you are. So your voice is the biggest, and your voice is truly the only voice that matters at the end of the day.

The other piece is, when parents are on that diagnostic journey, to really be thinking during those days and weeks and sometimes months that you sit on wait lists: How's the world set up for my kid right now? What's their screen time exposure like — have I really made sure that I've got that under control? What is their green time exposure like — are we really getting outside and in nature in the way that we are meant to do that? What about the pace of life — is that set up for them? Do they have enough free time to be able to catch their breath and rest into the world of play or whatever it is? What does it look like within my family dynamic — do we have enough time as a family to be in relationship at rest with each other?

And if there's anything amiss in any of those areas, do that first. So get that all sorted out and under control, and ride that out for a little while, and see if you notice changes in your child. Because those changes can be so stunningly significant in terms of how the child will then present. They go from looking like a child who, you know, clinically could meet criteria for many of those kinds of diagnoses, to a child who just looks like exactly what a four-year-old or a five-year-old or a six-year-old is meant to look like.

Lukas: The school year has just begun here in Australia and there's definitely some tears around drop-off. A lot of families are just feeling that tension at home as kids are getting settled in to getting back into the school year. Do you have any recommendations to parents, teachers, or educators to best support children during those transition times?

Dr. Vanessa: The bottom line is connection. Connection is everything — from sun up to sundown, and even while they're sleeping.

You can imagine for a child when they leave in the morning and say goodbye to their parent, they're away from them all day long and they have to manage their P's and Q's and follow the rules and behave and do all of the things, which is a lot of demand on a little person. And then the parent comes and picks them up and they've been away from them the whole day and had to endure all of this.

So they'll be so relieved to fall into your arms, and then five hot seconds later they are having what I call the "after school meltdown" — where they're like, "And my lunch was terrible and I don't want to go to that stupid park and I don't want to sit beside my stupid brother!" You know, they're in their stuff around the reaction to the day.

So the antidote to all of that — if you have children who are stressed to be at school or who appear stressed after school — is to make sure that you are infusing life with as much connectedness as possible:

Wake up a little bit earlier every morning so that you get a few moments in the morning to fill up their connection cup before you're sending them out for the day. Figure out how to be with them when you are not with them — stories like "The Invisible String" and "The Kissing Hand" — so that you send yourself to school with them.

I had one little boy who would wear a lanyard around his neck, hanging off the end of it was a picture of him with his mum and dad loving on him, and his daddy would spritz the lanyard with his cologne, and he just tucked it inside his shirt so he could sniff his dad all day long. And when he was really needing it, he could pull that picture out and have a look at them and be reminded that they're always with him.

When you pick them up from school, make sure there's huge invitation — you're not on your phone, you're not distracted by other things. They get to just melt into you. Create invitation for the meltdown if it needs to happen. Know that it's a release that they've been waiting all day long to have.

And then have your evening time connected — meal times are an important thing, and also a bedtime routine that's full of rich connection as well.

Lukas: You mentioned multiple times connection, but also green time, outdoors, nature. Why is that so important from your point of view?

Dr. Vanessa: There's something about being out in nature that connects us with the earth and connects us with where it is that we're from.

We now scientifically — I'm about to talk myself out of a job here actually — the two things that have the biggest impact in terms of reducing anxiety: being outside in nature, and moving your body. More powerful than any counseling intervention that's ever been studied.

And so there is something about being outdoors that reconnects us, I think, with the truth of who we are. And young children know it. They know it. We have it socialized out of us as big people, but young children know it to the core of their being. They are most themselves when they are outside and in the world of play.

Lukas: I would say a lot of parents recognize that need to move, but then it falls back into those structured activities. In your words, what would you describe as a structured activity? What are some examples?

Dr. Vanessa: Structured activities are anything that are adult-led and anything that have an outcome attached to them. So play can't ever be "for keeps." Play has to be just because. And there can't be any goal, any process, any kind of rigidity around what play is — otherwise it's not play. It's become structured and it's adult-led on some level. So we want for children to exist in the world of free play where they just get to go and see what comes.

Lukas: We have two children, they're four and six. Is there a connection that you see between those experiences as children into becoming resilient adults?

Dr. Vanessa: Absolutely. Where there's no opportunity for challenge, you completely extinguish the potential for growth. So you have to struggle in it. Not that we need to hold kids' heads beneath water, but to allow them to stretch a little bit, to get out of the comfort zone and to be like, "Oh, check it out, I just did that!" And then develop internally a belief about self that "I can do that, that I am able."

We hear so much about growth mindset, and yet when we are not allowing for that kind of play to exist — that unstructured, risky, free kind of play — it's as though we've become kind of the helicopter parent that's zooming all around and then children never get the chance to stretch. They don't see themselves as capable. They can't connect with the concept of courage because they've never experienced it.

And so we do have to allow for there to be this zone of — I call it stretch. So it's being outside the comfort zone into the stretch zone, but not necessarily in the panic zone.

Lukas: There's this disconnect between community's perception of risk and it's something to be avoided. You know, you're doing risk assessments on work sites and it's all like, "No, avoid it. A near miss is a tragedy." But we're starting to use the verbiage around "courageous play" — and that's where we develop courage. And you just see it click in families. It's like, "Oh!" An incident report that says "He fell over during courageous play," you're like, "Oh yeah!" But if I come in there and go, "Hey, he was engaging in risky play," the mind blows.

Dr. Vanessa: And one is fear-based. That's right. I remember being a doctoral student back in the day and I ended up at this lecture — they were playground architects from the school of architecture — and they were presenting this lecture on how playgrounds can be optimally designed to support the natural development of children. And I remember sitting through the whole thing thinking, "I can't even believe this is a whole field of study." I was completely mesmerized by the idea of what can go into the design of playgrounds in the support of child development and all of the layers. It's brilliant work, and how wonderful that you're doing that.

Lukas: During these unique times that the world's facing, if you have one bit of love to pass on to families out there, what is that?

Dr. Vanessa: I think that there is a gift that has been handed to us in this experience of COVID, and it's been a giant reset button. We were literally, in my part of the world anyways, forced into our homes and forced back to our families. All of those structured activities cancelled. The only thing that we had available to us was time and each other.

And those are the core ingredients of life. That's what makes the world go round. We are a social species. This is actually how we are meant to exist.

And so I would just really invite people to sit in the space of awareness around all of that. To know that these times that we're living through, they're not just a time to survive — they're a time for us to understand what it takes to thrive.

And as we emerge through this time of challenge on to the other side of it all, to be thinking about very mindfully: What is it that you are racing back to? And what is it that actually does not serve you, does not serve your families, and does not serve your children?

Lukas: That hits home for me, I know that much. For our listeners who want to learn more and follow you online, what's the best way to reach out, see your content, and hear more of your wisdom?

Dr. Vanessa: Thank you! So drvanessalapointe.com is where I am in terms of my website, and I have lots of articles on there about boredom and play and kids who are struggling to get off to school, as well as books and courses. And I'm pretty active on social media, on both Instagram and on Facebook. We've been posting about play a lot lately because this is the answer to where it is that we all are right now. So just following along and hoping to offer parents and families inspiration to stay the course.

Vanessa Ritson: I love your Instagram TV stories. They're fantastic.

Dr. Vanessa: Really good. I say, hit home.

Lukas: I'm sure our listeners are going to get so much out of this. I know I have. We both have. We feel so blessed to be able to talk to you via Zoom today, and just thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all you do for us and your community. It's so inspiring and it makes me want to be a better dad and a better operator and advocate for children. So thank you so much.

Dr. Vanessa: That's everything. Thank you.