There’s a Place: How Parents Help Their Children Create a Capacity for Playfulness and can it be Sustained across the Lifespan

This article traces the ways that playfulness shifts and grows with the child and with the parent-child dyad. It also speaks to the paradoxical manner in which feeling essential as a parent is both necessary at the beginning of the child’s life yet must evolve into relevance as the child’s autonomy warrants. Interestingly, grace and playfulness are both a content and a process in parenting. The playful parent’s wisdom produces a sense of grace over time just as it produces a way of being that the child can internalize so that they too can eventually parent with grace and fun should they so desire.