Are You Ready to Play With Your Kids?

Play is how a person learns something new by building an experience out of it. Children play constantly because that is how they practice for everything that comes later. Adults let it go, slowly, mostly because at some point we decide we already know what we need to know. Nobody announces the decision. You just look up one day and realize the last unstructured, purposeless, genuinely silly hour you spent was a very long time ago.

I want to tell you about a morning at a renaissance fair, and then I want to tell you the part that actually matters, which is not about your kids at all. It is about the two adults in the house and what happens to a marriage when both of them forget how to be ridiculous in front of each other.

The morning I played the dead king

Every year we go to Ren Fest for a day. It is genuinely fun to drop into the medieval period for a few hours. We stopped at the children's storytime theater and got invited up to play. My son Nathan was chosen for the lead role of Hamlet. Being his father, I got the role of his father, the dead king.

I was not expecting to be a thespian first thing in the morning. My honest plan for that hour was a seat, an adult beverage and a chance to relax, and my first reaction was to be grumpy about it.

Then I got on stage and saw Nathan's face. He was thrilled. So I made a decision, standing there in front of strangers, to change my emotional state on purpose. Instead of being embarrassed or put upon for being picked, I decided my job was to make Nathan a star by being the best supporting actor available.

As the Joker said in Tim Burton's Batman, if you gotta go, go with a smile. I went with a smile. I also died repeatedly, improvised several other characters, and by the end of a 13 minute production I had genuinely no idea how many times I had hit the floor.

Why adults quietly stop playing

Nobody decides to stop. It gets crowded out. There is a version of adulthood where every hour has a purpose, and play by definition has no purpose, so it is always the first thing cut when the schedule gets tight.

Then there is the embarrassment, which is the real one. Somewhere between 12 and 25 most of us learn that looking foolish is dangerous. We build a face and we wear it. The problem is that the same muscle that lets you be foolish on a stage is the muscle that lets you be foolish in a bedroom, and it does not atrophy in one place only.

This is really about the two of you

Here is where I stop being a dad telling a cute story. In my office, play shows up as a marriage complaint far more often than it shows up as a parenting complaint, and it usually arrives in one of two disguises.

The first is resentment. One parent is the fun one. They get on the floor, they do the voices, they make the mess. The other parent is running the operation, which means they are the one saying no, the one holding the schedule, the one cleaning up after the fun. Give that four years and the fun parent thinks their spouse is joyless and the operating parent thinks their spouse is a third child. Both of them are partly right, which is what makes it so hard to talk about.

The second disguise is quieter. Neither of you plays anymore. You are polite, competent, coordinated, and completely serious with each other. And then somebody wonders why the physical side of the marriage went flat, as if desire were a separate system that runs on its own power.

The fix is not that the serious parent should relax. The fix is that the roles are supposed to trade. When one of you gets on the floor, the other one gets to be off duty sometimes too, and that requires an actual conversation rather than an assumption about who does what.

How to actually do it when you are out of practice

Play is a skill and it comes back fast, but the first few attempts are awkward and you should expect that.

That last step is the one this whole article was walking toward. Most couples have not done anything together in years that did not have a purpose. Dinner has a purpose. A movie has a purpose. Try something neither of you is competent at and watch what happens to the temperature between you.

What it costs when nobody plays

A household with no play in it becomes an operation. Two competent adults, a schedule, a division of labor, and no reason to be in the same room except to coordinate. That is the parent marriage, and it is not a failure of love. It is a failure of design.

The visible symptom is usually the bedroom, and couples panic about it, because we are trained to read a quiet bedroom as proof that something is broken. Usually it is proof that nothing playful has happened between the two of you in four years, which is a completely different diagnosis with a completely different fix. I go through that at length in how desire fades naturally.

The next time they ask

The next time your kids ask you to spend time with them, see how far you can throw yourself into it. Not how patiently you can supervise it. How far in you can get.

And then notice whether you can do the same thing with your spouse, because if you cannot, that is worth looking at directly. Couples in this position are not in crisis and often do not think they qualify for help, which is a mistake. They are among the fastest couples I work with, and I laid out who actually calls me in who I work with.

Talk it through

If you can be silly with your kids but not with each other, something has quietly gone wrong in the middle of a marriage that looks fine from outside. Book a free 25 minute call. It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and it is a good use of an afternoon whether or not you ever hire me. If you want to see what the work looks like first, start with how to fix a struggling marriage.

Questions couples ask