Playful Parenting (Lawrence J. Cohen)
(New York: Ballantine, 2001, ISBN 0345442865)
Reviewed by lizw
I thought this was a bit of a curate’s egg. There are tons of good suggestions for injecting a bit of humour and playfulness into your parenting, turning tedious situations fun (e.g. by playing a game while queuing at the checkout), etc. Some of them are ideas I’ve instinctively used myself from time to time. Some of them are things I’ve tried that didn’t work, which is fair enough – Cohen does say that every child is different, and also that in some situations it can be very difficult to tell which of the different aspects of his approach to try. Given that, though, the book could have done with being presented in a more systematic way – it’s a bit rambling for my taste. He offers so many ideas that I found it difficult to put them into any sort of coherent order in my head, and in the heat of a tense parenting moment, I think I would have very little chance of remembering which specific recommendation applies. I’ve read other parenting books that are much better at this. Christopher Green’s books stand out in my mind for his ability to reduce everything to easy-to-remember phrases and mental images (and I agree with most of his recommendations, although not all of them). Preventing Childhood Eating Problems by Jane Hirschmann and Lela Zaphiropoulos is another good example, and one I can’t recommend highly enough. I think Cohen’s book will end up being a sort of inspiration in the background that reminds me to try to keep a light touch in my parenting, rather than something I try to follow closely.
Although I do think a lot of the content is very good, I also feel that the book suffers from more than a touch of what Overcoming Bias calls “happy death spiral”, or the tendency of someone with a shiny new hammer to think that everything looks like a nail. I think a good parenting toolkit needs to have more than one approach in it. There’s also probably some selection bias – I suspect that Cohen’s practice as a play therapist leads him to exaggerate the extent to which there is a Serious Emotional Issue underlying every random bit of inconvenient behaviour that children present their grown-ups with. His comments on “fake crying” are a particularly good example of this; he thinks that “most” children who do this have something else going on that they need to cry about. Most children he sees in his practice quite possibly do – they’re being brought to see him because someone else already thinks they have some kind of emotional disturbance going on, after all. I really don’t think it’s true of “most” of the children I’ve looked after in my family or social circles or at church, though.
Coupled with his belief that the Serious Emotional Issue almost always either consists of or is made worse by a lack of connection between the child and its caregiver(s), this leads to some recommendations that strike me as violating the child’s boundaries and potentially abusive (including recommendations to insist on eye contact even when the child does not want it, and to hold children against their will to re-establish connection). I agree from my own parenting experience that lack of connection sometimes is the problem, but I don’t think those are good ways of addressing it. I’ve found with my own kids that it works much better to try and create opportunities for connection, but let them decide when they are ready to take me up on them. Cohen also gives some examples where I think lack of connection probably wasn’t the problem at all. In fact, some of the instances he describes with his own daughter read to me very much as if the entire “problem” was a figment of his theorising in the first place. The obsession with connection leads him to be overly critical of methods like “time out”. He acknowledges that these do work for some kids – they worked for two of ours – but he promptly dismisses it, apparently because he thinks Playful Parenting will work for everyone, and work better.
I think what’s really needed is help for parents to figure out what will work for which child, and in what situations – which problems really are caused by lack of connection, and which are caused by something else, like overstimulation and being “peopled out” (which is when I think “time out” works really well). If I’d had that, I might have managed to help R out of her tantrum phase much sooner, because I admit I did waste quite a bit of time repeatedly using methods that had worked for B and C, but weren’t working for her. Cohen can’t offer that help, because as far as he’s concerned, the latter type of problem doesn’t really seem to exist. I’d really fear for an introverted or autistic child under his care. (There’s a whole other issue about his implied attitude to introverted parents, but this post is long enough already).
I also think Cohen underestimates the likelihood of his method being manipulated by the child. If overused, I think it could be a recipe for creating brattish and manipulative young adults. This seems to be linked to the fact that he thinks seeking attention is identical with actually needing it. This is about as stupid as pretending that no-one ever goes to the fridge for food when they’re not hungry; in an ideal world, both would be true, but in the world we’re stuck with, it’s just ignoring the facts. In both cases, the parent’s role is to help the child untangle the different kinds of physical and emotional need and find appropriate ways of meeting them.
This has turned into a bit more of a rant than I intended; the book really does have some good advice in it, too. Overall, I’d say treat Playful Parenting as the spice that gives the cake a bit of tang, but don’t confuse it with the flour.
