Play once, fully there

Your kids don’t want five distracted games. They want one where you’re actually in the room.

I learned this the slow way, so let me hand it over quickly.

There was a stretch of my life when I’d say yes to every request from my children — play with me, come and see this, do the thing — and I’d do it, five, six times a day, with ten emails open in my head and a jaw like a fist. I was there, physically. I was nowhere, really. And I thought that counted, because I’d said yes and I’d turned up.

Here’s what I didn’t understand. Children don’t hear the words. They feel the energy.

They can tell, instantly and completely, when a parent is present and when a parent is performing presence. The forced smile, the eyes that keep drifting, the short temper being held back by the teeth — they pick up all of it. And what they get from a resentful, distracted game isn’t the game. They get a parent’s body in the room and a parent’s frustration in the air. And that air puts a child on edge, because something’s wrong, and they can’t say what, because everything looks fine.

I’d rather play once with them fully there — fully willing, fully engaged, actually in the game — than five times that day resentful and elsewhere. Once is a gift. Five times is a debt I was paying badly.

But that one honest game requires something most of us can’t do: a boundary, said with love.

I have to finish some work. I can be with you in half an hour.

That sentence took me years to say without guilt. Because it’s a no — a small, temporary no — and if you’ve built your identity on never letting anyone down, a no to your own child feels unforgivable. So instead we say yes, badly, and call it good parenting.

It isn’t. The half-hour is the good parenting. It’s the thing that makes the game real when it comes. Said calmly, said warmly, said with an actual time attached and kept — it teaches a child two things at once: that their parent has needs, and that when their parent does show up, they get all of them.

There’s something else I want to say, because I know the voice that’ll be running in your head right now. I snapped yesterday. I was on my phone. I wasn’t there. Yes. Me too. Raising children while trying to heal yourself — while carrying your own childhood, your own tiredness, your own unfinished stuff — is one of the hardest things a person can do. The ones who do it unconsciously, just repeating what was done to them, have it easier. You’re doing it with your eyes open, and that costs, and it deserves credit rather than the nightly inventory of everything you got wrong.

So: one game. Fully there. Then a boundary, kindly, so there’s something left for the next one. And a bit of honour for yourself for trying at all, because your children are getting something you may never have had — a parent who’s actually in the room.

If you’ve been playing five resentful games a day and feeling guilty about all of them, none of that was failure. It was love, with nothing left in the tank. It’s not your fault. But there’s a better version, and it starts with half an hour.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online — ten minutes of coming back into your own body, so there’s a whole person available to play. Come and try a session, and see what’s left afterwards.

— Adam