When You Don’t Like Playing With Your Kids

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello my beautiful friend. Welcome back to the podcast. I am delighted to be here with you today to talk about when you don’t like playing with your kids. Today I have a message that came in via email from someone in this community that reads the following,

Natalie, help. I don’t like playing with either of my two kids and I feel horrible about it. My son always wants to play rough and be wild and it’s just not me. My daughter really leans into more imaginative play and that feels hard too. I’m fine with coloring or crafts or legos, but when it’s outside my comfort zone, I really don’t do well. When I’m playing with them, I feel awkward. I often wish I was doing something else or find an excuse to end the play early and go be productive in some other way. Then I feel really guilty and horrible about that. I really don’t feel like I’m showing up as the mom I want to be. I feel like a bad mom and I’m just wondering if I can approach this in any different way. Thank you so much.

Alright my friends. Let’s dive into this. The first thing that I want to to start off with here is normalizing all of this. If you don’t like certain types of play, nothing is wrong with you. You are definitely not a bad mom, it’s just that you have certain preferences, just like all human beings have certain preferences. If you think about different stages and ages of your kids, maybe you love the baby phase and don’t love the toddler phase or maybe you love the teenage years and don’t really like the school age years or vice versa. So just remembering that as a human being with a human healthy functioning brain, it is normal to have preferences. I love to think about food with respect to preferences because usually there’s just no judgment of it at all. So I am someone who loves sweet potatoes. I don’t like lima beans and I don’t feel guilt about that. And if you think about the foods that you like or don’t like, you probably don’t have any judgment about it. You don’t think you’re a bad person or woman or wife or mom because you enjoy certain types of foods and prefer not to eat other types of foods.

So I, I use that to kinda illustrate the point here that when you have a preference towards certain types of play and you don’t like a lot of other types of play, that is okay. It just means that your brain is picking up on what you actually like and don’t like and that’s a normal part of the human experience. So for all of you listening , I coach on this a lot. If you don’t like certain types of play or you don’t like all types of play, nothing is wrong with you. Let’s just start from this place of removing all of that judgment of making it mean that you’re bad or wrong or you should be any different than you are. You are right on track my friend. The reason that this is the first step and it’s so important is because when you’re beating yourself up, when you’re feeling guilty about it, you will avoid curiosity and avoid learning about yourself.

And it’s only from curiosity and learning about yourself that you have any chance of changing this if you want to. So I am going to give you strategies to kind of get more comfortable with play if that’s something you want. But it’s only accessible. It will only work if it comes from this place of just accepting kind of, without any judgment where you are right now and just telling yourself it’s 100% okay that I don’t like play right now. Nothing is wrong with me, I’m an amazing mom, I’m just a human with preferences like all other humans. Something else that really helps me when I’m having moments of boredom or I don’t feel like playing with my kids in that moment is to remember the human brain and how it develops. So right now you enjoy things that are engaging to you, they’re interesting to you.

There is a level of difficulty that you might enjoy for problem solving. So if you look at a puzzle and let’s say it’s a 500 piece puzzle that might sound really interesting and fun to you, you might like the image and you might want to to do it. Now if you looked at a puzzle that was five pieces, it’s probably not going to be that interesting to you in the same way. But on the other end of the spectrum, if you looked at a puzzle that was 10,000 pieces, you might say, okay, nope, not going to do this because it’s too far on the end of the spectrum. So if something is just way too easy for us, it’s just too boring and if something is way too challenging for us, it takes too much brain energy. So we like things that are kind of in the middle where it’s just challenging enough to, you know, give us a chance at being successful with it.

It kinda triggers this part of us that we really like to problem solve with in like an effective way. Like you don’t want to to do a math problem that’s two plus two. You also don’t want to do a complicated complex geometry math problem, but you might, you know, feel confident and comfortable doing some math problems of some you know, more advanced multiplication that you have to carry some numbers over from. Why this is important here is because when your kids are playing, they are on that other end of the spectrum where the play is too easy for you. So if they weren’t around, you wouldn’t be doing the things that they’re doing because their brain is at just a totally different stage of development. So just recognizing that of course you’re having these thoughts and feelings and this relationship with play just is another way to normalize it.

It’s like the stage of your brain is so much different and further along than where your kids’ brains are in their development, that it makes complete sense that they are very engaged by this five piece puzzle or building a fort or whatever it is that is engaging for them and it makes sense that they would enjoy that where they’re at and where their brain’s at. And it also makes complete sense that that’s not that interesting to you ’cause it’s too far on the one end of the spectrum. It’s just not engaging and interesting. So again, this is just another way for you to normalize. It’s okay to just be where you’re at and not make it mean anything about you or kind of the kind of mom you are. I promise you, you are an amazing mom even if you never play with your kids.

Now that said, from this place of normalizing not liking play with playing with your kids, I am going to offer you some ways that you can change if you want to, but I want you to change not from guilt but from a place of really loving where you are. So you love where you are, but you also want to expand your capacity to play in a way that right now you feel a little bit awkward with. It’s like when I coach my weight loss clients inside the membership and I teach them how to love their body and lose weight from loving the body that they’re currently in, it’s I love you and let’s change and grow versus I hate you, I hate my body, I can’t stand the way I look and I want to lose weight. It’s a much more painful process to lose weight that way.

It doesn’t really work. It tarnishes the relationship you have with yourself and most likely it’s not going to be effective. So for any type of change, whether it’s losing weight, whether it’s making more money, whether it’s yelling at your kids or in this case if you want to grow and change the way that you relate to play, starting from acceptance and just loving yourself right where you are without you needing to be different at all is the way to go. It’s such a more rewarding and a more effective process when you do it this way. Okay, the next part of this, once you have fully accepted yourself to actually change the way that you relate to play and enjoying playing with your kids a little bit more, is to notice the real root cause of this. So the way that this person wrote in and the way that all of my clients come to me with respect to this issue is as if it’s a fact.

It’s like, hi, my name is Natalie, I am five foot six and I don’t like to play with my kids. It’s almost as if I’m like reporting just facts about myself. I’m going to just tell you about myself. One of the things is I don’t like to play When we say things in this way, it makes it sound like it’s a fact. Like my height is a fact and it’s also a fact that I don’t like playing with my kids. But that’s just not true. It’s a thought that has become part of your identity because you’ve repeated it so much, you believe it at your core. It’s kind of like, you know the thought, I’m overweight, I’m using this example because I think we can all relate to that as an identity. However you think about your health, if you think I’m overweight or I’m unhealthy, you will live into that.

You will make it true. Your brain always has good evidence for it. So you have really great evidence for how you don’t like to play with your kids and you live into that. And the more you repeat that, the more you create more evidence of it. But if you just notice that that is not who you are at your core, it’s just an identity that you’ve put on. If you think of like outfits, we all have different identities that we wear in different scenarios. If you work, let’s say you work as a lawyer, you have one outfit that you wear to court, and then when you go home and you’re in your mom role, you have a different outfit, a different identity. So I want you to think about not enjoying playing with your kids just as an identity outfit that you’ve put on. And what you’re going to do is take off that outfit, put down that identity and put on a new outfit, a new identity, and you’re going to look in the mirror and you’re going to think, I don’t know this, this isn’t me.

I feel a little bit awkward, I’m not sure, but that is the point because that’s what’s required to get comfortable in that new outfit, to get comfortable in that new identity. So it’s repetition, it’s the journaling that I teach inside the Mom On Purpose membership. If you’re not a member, I highly recommend joining so that you can get these tools and really live into that identity. Any identity that you want to be is available to you. If it is desired on your heart, I promise you, you can create that for yourself. How this looks practically is you start to tell yourself what you want to believe about yourself as the identity. So you’re probably not going to go from, I don’t like imaginative play at all to I love imaginative play, but what identity can you jump to? Can you think that really does feel good and true to you?

Maybe it’s something like every day I’m becoming more comfortable with imaginative play. Now again, this has to come from a genuine desire to want this change, but if you do want the change, if you do want to like playing with your kids, telling yourself every day I’m becoming better at playing with my kids is a great place to start. It gives you momentum forward for the change that you want instead of repeating the past identity that you don’t want any more of. So that’s what you’re going to do when you start this process of change. You’re going to start repeating the new identity so that you live into that. And for those of you inside the membership, you do the future focused becoming her journaling where you write about what that is like and you can follow the steps in that course so you can create those future focused memories where your mindset creates exactly what you want to experience in your everyday life because that mental rehearsal will show up in your actions because right now the thoughts and the feelings that are causing your actions are coming from your past.

And so what we want to to do is create them from your future so you quite literally can live from your future. And if you imagine your future self as someone who enjoys this type of play, what is that like for her? What kind of thoughts and feelings do you have and writing about that and living from that place is how you genuinely change your identity and your actions will follow. Another tool that I want to offer to you here is to ask yourself if you have enough play in your own life and do you feel comfortable playing? I have been playing around with this idea, no pun intended there for a while. And what I’ve realized is that I’ve went from someone who was really type A overworked and kind of that was my whole life and identity to someone who wanted to change that. And so I incorporated a lot more rest and now I feel very comfortable with both of those buckets.

I feel comfortable working and like getting stuff done and I feel really comfortable resting, relaxing, taking a nap in the middle of the day. I don’t do as many as I wish I did, but I don’t have a problem with it. Whereas, you know, when I was overworking and just in that full identity, the sheer thought of resting or taking a nap or not working seemed intolerable. Like I felt real terror. So that transformation is one that I’ve already kind of gone on and I can live in both of those spaces pretty effortlessly. I can work and get things done when I need to do that and I can also rest, when I want to do that. Another bucket to add in and how this kind of ties into this episode is play. What do you do for play in your current life? Do you have enough play?

Some of you listening are like, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. What is play if it’s not for my kids? So what would you just choose to do if you had a Saturday afternoon and you weren’t going to get things done and work or take care of the home, you weren’t taking care of the kids, you weren’t going to rest, but you genuinely wanted to play for yourself, what would that look like? Brainstorm a list of like 25 -50 ideas. Just go, go, go to get your brain thinking about how you can create more play for yourself. Because when you get more comfortable with play for yourself, you’ll be more comfortable playing with your kids. If you are in your kind of work energy, get things done energy and you’re trying to play with your kids, it makes sense that you would feel uncomfortable. Your body isn’t loosened up, your body isn’t ready for play.

So how do you experience play? For me, dance is something that I really like to do that creates a sense of play for me. I also like kind of adrenaline producing types of play. So I love like go-karts, that’s really fun for me. Those scooters when I lived dowant toown Chicago, I don’t even know if they’re a thing anymore, but you could just pick up a scooter and and get one from the app. Oh my gosh, I used to ride those all around town. I broke all the rules, I went in the street, I went on the sidewalk. I did not care. It was like so freeing to me. I felt the ultimate, freedom and fun and joy. I just really enjoyed it. Even just thinking about it, I’m like I really need to get myself a scooter. I love scooters, I love kind of that rush. A lot of people like pickleball right now and there are other types of kind of exercise that you might find to be a sense of play, but the key is that at its core it’s effortless for you to enjoy. Some people like coloring or other types of play that are more kind of stationary or sitting there. There’s no kinda right or wrong, but you do want to to pay attention to the feeling.

So when you feel playful in your energy, that is what I want you to pay attention to. That’s what I want you to create more of. And it might something that you really haven’t cultivated since you were a kid. I see some of these photos of myself when I was a kid being so silly and I love that as a reminder. Like we all have that fun silliness in us. Even if kind of on the spectrum of kids you were a more serious kid, you still have that inner child in you. You just have to kinda wake it up a little bit and cultivate it and you might feel a little bit silly and that’s okay. So I’ll give you an example. When I first started kind of turning on music and having dance parties around the house, just if we need a shift in energy or if I want to create a different kinda mood or something, it felt a little bit awkward at first and now it’s just effortless.

And so there might be that first phase of trying play where you do feel a little bit awkward and silly and you’re tempted to judge yourself and just allow it like I’m being silly right now and I want to to be silly. It’s okay. Practice that inner kindness, that inner self-talk that you get to choose. A lot of times on default, our inner self-talk is unkind. Like what are you doing? This is ridiculous. You shouldn’t be doing this. But make a decision not to talk to yourself that way. Make a decision to be kind to yourself because you want to grow in this way. If it is something that truly requires growth on your part, there will be discomfort. And so that’s just good to remember. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. It doesn’t mean this should be easier, it just means that this is a growth journey for you and that’s kind of cool that your kids get to kind of open up this part of you that you probably haven’t accessed in a really long time.

Like what a gift for you for yourself and what a gift for them. Like that’s pretty awesome. Something I think that can be really connecting authentic and impactful as you are kind of becoming someone who enjoys more play is to be honest about where you are at. Oftentimes we think that connection is happiness. So if my child wants to build forts and have a good time doing that, then it’s easy for me to think, oh, in order for us to feel connected right here, I need to do that. Like it be really good at it. But that’s not true. Connection isn’t doing what the other person wants. Connection is authenticity. So it might be that you say to your son, I would love to do forts with you for 20 minutes. I am building my capacity to get better at play. It’s kind of uncomfortable for mommy to use my imagination and I love that you are so skilled at that, I’m working on that. But it’s something that’s a little bit more challenging for me right now. It’s hard for me to get into and so I’m just going to put a time limit on it so that it’s easier for me to practice doing this and that honesty is connection. I’ve been doing this so much more with my kids and my family and it’s so freeing When you see connection as authenticity, it really changes the way that you show up and you give them space to feel how they want to feel. You don’t expect them to feel happy all of the time about that kind of boundary or limitation, and that’s okay too. You’re giving them space to maybe feel kind of bummed and they’re giving you space to feel how you want to feel. It’s true authenticity. There’s a depth to the relationship that you will really experience when you do this.

So I definitely recommend as you are kinda increasing your capacity to play, you put some boundaries around play for yourself like we might do for anything we do that we don’t want to do or don’t like doing, but we do it anyways. We say, okay, I’m just going to do this for this amount of time. So you might say, okay, I’m going to play for 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, whatever it is. And then you’re honest about why and you say it. Taking ownership of what you are working on and why it’s challenging for you and how this is something you want to grow in that is just so helpful for you. It’s also though, connecting in the relationship and on top of that, your modeling to your kids. So many things including integrity, honesty, growth, change, the discomfort of it, all of it.

And so I definitely recommend kind of being forthcoming instead of trying to pretend typically what we do. That’s why I started this podcast talking about removing that layer of shame. Because if you have shame, if you make it mean that because you don’t like doing something you are bad, you aren’t going to put limits around it because you don’t want to to be bad. And then if you do, you’re going to kind of lie or make up excuses. So you might say, oh, I have to stop because I really have to go do the laundry or do the dishwasher or do whatever else, or kind of finding a reason instead of just being more honest about it. But that honesty is only available from a place of des shaming the entire situation. So if you are comfortable and confident with who you are and where you’re at and just not liking play, if you don’t make it mean you’re a bad mom, then it’s so much easier to work on this and to be forthcoming and honest with your kids, which I think hopefully I’ve already sold you on the benefits of that. The last tool and suggestion that I want to leave you with is to come up with mantras that you want to be your beliefs about play specifically with respect to prioritizing play and believing that it’s important if that’s what you want to do. If you want to believe that play is important, if you want to believe that play is a priority, if you want to believe that you have the capacity and can become someone who enjoys more play, then you have to think thoughts that see that belief. You have to think thoughts that embody that for you. You have to think thoughts that make that true because that’s what you’ll live into. So if you are thinking, I’m not good at play, I don’t like imaginative play, I can’t wait for this is to be over, that’s going to create a completely different experience than if you’re thinking every day I’m increasing my capacity to get better at imaginative play because I think play is so important.

I prioritize play. I love that. I prioritize play. I love getting outside my comfort zone. It is hard and it is so worth it. So come up with thoughts that you can use as mantras that prioritize play. Play is important. I value play. This type of play is an opportunity for me to grow and for me to connect with my kids. Make a list of five or 10 mantras trying the ones that feel the best to you. I love play is important. I love, I prioritize play. I love, I’m expanding my capacity to play by practicing and direct your brain to those thoughts so that you live into this new identity. All right, my friends, I know that so many of you struggle with this. I think most of our community is filled with, high achieving women. I’m one of those women. I love that about myself and I love that having kids and growing with them is an opportunity to expand my capacity to play. So I’m doing this work right there with you. I think it is work worth doing. I’m so glad you’re here. I love you so much. Thanks for being here and I will talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.