The stress financial struggles place on you can’t be overstated. It’s especially rough if you have kids since they won’t fully understand what’s going on. Luckily, there is a way to both relieve some of your stress, even if only temporarily, and not spend money: spend time with your children!
Whether you’re in the middle of calculating child support in Ontario or just need a break from your job search, any of the following activities will entertain you and your child both while bettering your bond. Read on when you’re ready to play.
Bust Out the Board Games
It may have been a while since you last saw those old, colorful cardboard boxes filled with hours of delight. The modern day has a lot of ways to keep us entertained and most of them involve technology.
While this is all well and good most of the time, power outages, a need to keep the electricity and wifi bills low, and a desire to unplug and step away from it all are just a few of the reasons to bust out your favorite board games. What you may not have considered is the benefits provided for children by playing board games.
Two of these benefits are showing them how to be a good loser and soothing anxiety. You can’t win everything, and losing stings. Losing is especially painful for children since they’re still learning not only the rules of a game but also emotional maturity. They want to win because winning feels good which we can all relate to.
However, we often lose in life more than we win. Teaching a child early on that losing does suck, yeah, but also isn’t the end of the world and can be a good thing will make their future interactions go much smoother.
Some children are lucky enough to lead nearly stressless lives. Most are not this lucky. Homework and school performance will be the largest contributing factors to your child’s stress level most of the time, but those with high emotional intelligence or an anxiety disorder may notice when you’re stressed and feel the heat themselves, even if they don’t quite know why.
Learning to manage this anxiety is vital because unchecked anxiety is crippling but sometimes all we need is a temporary distraction. Board games are the perfect option because they require your full attention. A bonus is that it will help decrease your anxiety as well.
Go Outside
As mentioned above, modern life is centered around electronics. An unfortunate consequence of this is that many children will spend more time inside staring at screens than they will running and playing outside. This makes playing outside with your children much more valuable than you may realize at first.
One of the many benefits of children playing outside is an increase in their ability to concentrate. The outside world has many distractions and while you’ve learned how to pick and choose what to focus on and why, your children haven’t nailed that quite yet.
Playing simple games like freeze tag or Simon Says will teach your children to pay attention to a task while also being aware of the environment around them.
For example, you need to avoid getting caught in freeze tag but will also have to pay attention and avoid people who got tagged already and other runners. They’ll realize all of this needs to be considered and learn to concentrate on the most important thing in the moment. It may be difficult for them at first, but children learn quickly; they’ll get the hang of it in no time.
Write and Tell Stories
Writing and telling each other stories is a great way to have fun with your kids. It allows them to understand empathy and problem-solve in entirely new ways while also expressing the immense imagination and creativity that children have.
The characters in their stories will be presented with situations that a child may have never experienced before and, in some cases, hopefully never will. The writer must then consider how this would make someone feel and represent that. In other words, your child will be viewing the plight of another and imagining how it may make them feel–the very definition of empathy.
Problem-solving may make less sense at first, but consider that every story needs a conflict of some sort. Since these characters and scenarios aren’t real, the problems they face will be fabricated. These problems need solutions and this helps your child learn problem solving because it is much easier to have a problem than it is to fix it.
Helping your child find the perfect solution to their problem and letting them excitedly write out their character’s actions will bring an almost endless amount of joy and will surely make you proud. It could even give you some ideas on how to solve some of the problems you face as well.
