Even though they don’t go very far with their movements it’s a form of learning. This is your infant’s way of understanding their body and their environment.
This typically looks like random movements or jerks that seem like fun to your baby.
#Parallel play how to
Or maybe it’s because we don’t think we know how to play at this stage in our lives. Maybe it’s out of white jealousy (especially when play is framed as “a child’s job” and we realize we don’t get to do as much of it as we wish we could). Couples can slip into parallel play accidentally, through the gradual pull of multiple demands in busy lives, and sometimes all it takes is a shared awareness to trigger a beneficial course correction.Looking for more examples of play in babies, toddlers, and preschoolers? Check out our package with more information on solitary play, onlooker play, associative play, and cooperative play.Īs an adult, it can be easy to overlook the importance of play for children. If it describes your relationship, find ways to increase your interactive time together - through establishing a ritual of an after-dinner walk or a Sunday morning coffee chat, through shared sports or hobbies, through taking a class together, even through socializing with others. Parallel play rarely leads to a strong and satisfying marriage. It may mean leaving work early to meet for dinner and a show. It may mean taking a walk with my partner instead of watching my son’s every soccer game. It may mean forgoing an evening at the gym to commit to regular date night. There’s a balancing act here, sometimes requiring us to sacrifice, for the moment, the pursuit of one of these goals in order to promote the other. Often, the pursuit of personal happiness - what I do with my time - conflicts with the pursuit of marital satisfaction - what we do as a couple to strengthen and enjoy our bond. But they also expect a high level of personal life satisfaction and fulfillment - from the pursuit of activities and work and friendship and more. We’re in the same house, but, like those toddlers, we’re in parallel play.Ĭompared to generations past, people expect a high level of satisfaction from marriage nowadays. 1 It seems, too, that the increasing presence of technology has facilitated being “alone together," 2 each spouse on a computer or device, reading email, posting on Facebook, or playing a game with an online partner (rarely the spouse). Studies have found that interaction between husbands and wives, such as eating dinner or participating in leisure activities together, declined significantly from 1980 to 2000. Or where date night sounds like a good idea but gets sacrificed to whatever else comes along. Or the marriage where the children’s needs and wants always trump couple time. It’s the marriage where spouses spend more time with friends - shopping or golfing, fitness class or book club - than with each other. Marriage, too, can feature parallel play: spouses busying themselves with work and hobbies and their own particular to-do lists, without a lot of overlapping interaction. Seems that parallel play isn’t limited to toddlers.