Heather Camlot

A couple of weeks ago, I attended an event at Ikea in which the mega-store revealed the results of its global research on child development and play. We’re talking the largest study of its kind, with more than 11,000 interviews with parents, experts and children across 25 countries.   

And what I heard surprised me. According to the Playreport, kids much prefer playing with their friends (89 per cent) and their parents (73 per cent) than watching television.

At first I found this hard to believe. When Alexandre would come home from school, he wanted to go to the basement and watch Ben 10. He was tired and just wanted some downtime. And I was okay with that – it’s the reason we pulled him out of after-school daycare; he was too beat to participate in any of the activities and so it was a big waste of money.

BUT, I did notice the above stats come to life two weekends ago when the World Cup match between Germany and England was on. We were invited to our neighbor’s house to watch the game. It was cute – our neighbor being from England and Alexandre being half-German. There was a large crowd gathered and Alexandre loved it (even more so because Germany really pummeled the English team).

The thing is, Alexandre couldn’t sit still for the whole 90-minute game. After about 20 minutes, he pulled my arm, said “Come on, Mom” and went outside to PLAY soccer with other neighbors. He’d pop back in to check the score and just as quickly pop back out to kick a real ball into a real net. It wasn’t enough to watch the game. He needed to play it. And he needed to play it with me and his friends.

Sometimes, as parents, we forget we’re the most important people in our children’s lives. We’re tired, we’re stressed, we have 20 million things to do before the day is over. And all we want to do is go to the basement, watch television and have some downtime. And that’s okay – as long as we remember that one of those 20 million things we need to do before the day is over is play with our kids.