The playground lately is pure terror—for me.
My 19-month-old jettisons up the metal steps, grasping a railing too big for her hands. She is not quite sure-footed: sometimes she transitions into a crawl or scoot. Then she pulls herself off the stairs, onto the play structure, and tumbles down the slide. Again and again, she repeats this, increasing in confidence, falling, succeeding, repeating, while I—in accordance with momfluencer gospel—remind myself not to intervene.
She is bold, excited, risk-taking, social here; she shrieks with delight. The sunlight catches on the halo of her delicate hairline. I have to drag her out past the gates to go home, and she is the quintessential toddler, a doldrum of anguish.
I think about all this as we walk back, tantrum at bay, a tear lingering in her eyelashes. The playground is the one space she is allowed to embrace play—it was built for her and her small peers with their new-to-walking legs and their just-barely-strong-enough neck muscles. Our Upper East Side apartment offers less than 1000 square feet of surfaces she can’t draw on and objects that, in her capable hands, swiftly become dangerous.
Peter Gray, an academic who writes about the intersection of education and play, expressed poignantly in a 2011 edition of American Journal of Play that “somehow, as a society, we have come to the conclusion that to protect children from danger and to educate them, we must deprive them of the very activity that makes them happiest.” These words are something I think about often, both as an educator and as a mother.
Gray’s research is a stark reminder of why adults must at times suppress their own instincts when it comes to parenting. Adults are attracted to conservative risk profiles. We fear pain, shame, and punishment enough to avoid potential reward. And that’s all well and good for us grown-ups, but our projection onto our children harms their development.
Babies and toddlers are far better at learning than we are. “All infants are successful,” Jeff Olson wrote in The Slight Edge, “as infants, we are masters.” It’s no coincidence that their playtime also involves more risk; babies and young children have an affinity for accidental injuries, trips, and falls. The mastery comes hand-in-hand with the injury.
It’s cumbersome to be a mother right now, to know everything that’s good and everything that’s bad, and to know this Venn diagram is just a circle. There’s more information—and misinformation and disinformation—than there has ever been before. I remind myself frequently: all you have to do is your bare minimum. I carry around the famous words of Jewish scholar Rabbi Tarfon, that “you are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” an adage that may just sum up my parenting style.
What’s my bare minimum? Our child is clean and fed. We bathe her every day or two, but sometimes we only remember when she’s covered herself in paint or eaten chocolate. She eats a decent variety of foods, but only raw vegetables, and she prefers cookies or boxed mac n’ cheese to just about everything else.
Sometimes she wants to be cuddled and entertained, and sometimes she forgets we’re with her. When she brings us a book to read, we remember that she’s interested in more than just its content. In the words of Silke Rose West and Joseph Sarosy in How To Tell Stories to Children, “at its core, storytelling is about relationships.” When she is focused on something or someone else, I refrain from interrupting with my own stream of consciousness.
We teach her as much as we can without pushing her. We speak to her like she’s an adult, but say things we would never say to an adult. No adult in my life would want to hear the entire history of the Dutch tulip trade or a breakdown of the animal classification system. She’s learning this all for the first time, though, absorbing it with alacrity. Every time we mention a new word or share a concept within or just out of her grasp, we ask her to repeat the word. Sometimes, when we need a break, we let her learn from Ms. Rachel. And she’s been in daycare since she was six weeks old—both of us work, we love work, and she loves school.
We are open with our joy, and if we don’t authentically feel it, we play the part. There is no excuse in the world not to beam when your child comes home from school. There is no acceptable reason to dampen the happiness or curiosity our children feel toward the world around them. We do not embrace toxic positivity, but we believe our child’s optimism toward the world around her is rooted in how we teach her to react. As people who have struggled with our mental health, we talk back to the depressive and hopeless voices in our heads when we are around her.
We show her how to embrace our tradition. We bring her to our synagogue each week, frequently enough that when she recognizes the building’s facade she shouts “SHUL!” and when she identifies the congregational leaders, “RABBI!” Every Friday night we light candles at our window, which faces a tree-lined Upper East Side street, prewar buildings, and, currently, windblown cherry blossoms that fall like snow. When we finish, her eyes reflecting the flames, I pull her from her reverie, and we dance to the age-old Jewish tune of Shalom Aleichem.
And, at the playground, which currently terrifies me, we let her learn about falling and kids who don’t share. We let her learn about risk and recklessness. We let her learn about fun, and leaving places behind, and the activities she enjoys or will want to avoid. We allow her to experience the power of the wind rushing in her ears and the sky coming flush at her smiling face as she swings high in the air. We tell ourselves, she’s safe. Safe enough.
by Kristine Western 
by Lynee Posthumus 
by Jessica Manack 
