In PHQP_0009 Caregiver Self-Care Is Important, Jeff stresses the vital role of recharging for caregivers. On this Playvolution HQ Podcast episode, learn why self-care isn’t selfish but an investment in emotional energy for kids, colleagues, and loved ones. Plus, a DIY explosion activity with film canisters, seven adult responses to child-led play, and innovative loose parts use. Plus, a gravity-defying Dad Joke of the Week!

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0009 Caregiver Self-Care Is Important

Episode Notes

• Lots Of Self-Care Related Links
• 7 Common Adult Responses to Child-Led Play
• Fun With Explosions

The Caregiver Self-Care Is Important Transcript

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play…on with the show.

So, I was really looking forward to starting the show off with a little bit of conversation about how I really love watching concrete buckle and decay and crack over time. But that got pushed out of the way because a hunk of concrete I was watching buckle and crack and break down over time made a big change and a couple of hunks of it broke loose. And I was all excited to talk about that.

But then I noticed on a recent walk that they were gone. And then I saw them and I was delighted because as we talked about one, play grows from inside the player and two, loose parts are awesome. A couple of neighborhood kids picked them up and they were using these hunks of concrete as bases at the local playground for a kid version of baseball.

Now, it wasn’t baseball because they didn’t have nine people to make, enough people to make out nine people on each team and it was just five or six of them playing. But they were making it work because again, play comes from within child. And they found these, they found the bits and pieces they needed to make a field and play commenced and that’s awesome.

So play is sparked by the minds of the children playing and loose parts are awesome. Just a little bit of follow up on those two things here. We’ll talk about my joy of observing concrete fall apart later.

Topic one, core values. Part nine, like I mentioned last time, we’re talking about caregiver self-care and its importance. Because the work of a caregiver is to be emotionally available, to be present in the moment with the children.

That means being right here, right now. And that’s really difficult. We talked about that in one of the earlier episodes about being right here, right now as being the core.

But what that does is it takes a lot of emotional labor. There’s plenty of physical labor in early learning but a big part of it is that emotional labor because we’re giving our emotional resources away all the time and it’s a limited resource. And so we’re doling it out little bit by little bit by little bit all day long to the kids in our care, to our coworkers, to the parents we work with in our program, maybe to the administrators we work with.

We’re trying to bring some home to our sweetie pie and maybe our children and dog, your house plant. You wanna be present for them too. And it’s really easy to get drained.

And it turns out that professional caregivers are often very, very good at the doing of the emotional labor but they fall short when it comes to the flip side of that, the taking care of themselves side. And that can really be a problem because if you don’t fill your cup up again, you run out of resources to give. And one reason I hear for caregivers not taking care of themselves, I’ve written two books of this topic and I’ve been talking about it for over 20 years in trainings is sometimes people feel selfish but self-care isn’t selfish.

Self-care is an investment in yourself and in the investment in the quality of work that you do with other people and the quality of the relationships you have with the people important to you. So we need to really make time for that self-care. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

You have to fill yourself up. And so you need to make time to invest in your own needs. And what that looks like is gonna differ from person to person.

What refreshes and rejuvenates and makes somebody else ready to get in there and do this work might be stressful to somebody else. So you gotta find your thing and make time for it. Maybe it’s exercise, maybe it’s gardening, maybe it’s reading, maybe it’s fiber work, knitting, crocheting, quilting, that kind of thing.

But you need to make time for your own thing to fill you up along with eating well and getting a good night’s sleep. You are an emotional charging station. So really the big part of this is children get emotionally worn out themselves and they come to us to be charged up.

And we give away that emotional energy, that reserve, and then we don’t have anything left for ourselves or for our families or for the rest of the day because being right here right now can be really, really draining. So if you’re gonna be a charging station, you’ve gotta have a regular supply of current to do the charging for the others, which means you need to invest in self-care. And that’s exactly what self-care is.

Self-care is an investment, an investment in your mindset, an investment in your mood. And if you’re gonna do this job for any length of time, it’s really important that you build a professional self-care practice. Now, there’s a link in the show notes.

We’ve got a whole section at the PlayvolutionHQ.com website that’s devoted to self-care. There’s probably 100, 150 articles over there that you can go through and you can find some stuff. And I do online trainings on this topic as well.

If you’ve got questions and you’re too tired to look for resources yourself, send me an email, I’ll send you some things. Topic two, fun with explosions. This is a video I put together a while ago because, well, exploding stuff is fun.

And this is the simple way and inexpensive way that you can help kids have fun with explosions. Let’s go to that video now. Hey, Jeff Johnson, Explorations Early Learning here.

Thanks for pushing play. I’ve got a DIY idea for you, fun with explosions. Nothing mixes better than young children and explosions is my mind.

So here’s a way to make it fun, keep it safe. But first, a history lesson. So back in the day, there were these things called cameras that we used to use to take pictures.

And it was a whole big deal. You’d put the stuff called film in the cameras and you’d take the pictures and you’d take the film out of the cameras and you’d put them in one of these little film canisters and bring them to the Photoshop and then, I mean, way back in the day, it took like a week to get your pictures back and then they got it under 24 hours and then an hour and then maybe half your pictures didn’t turn out because like grandma was all blurry or something. Anyway, it was a dark time, but one of the great things about it was these little film canisters.

So they have, they’re small and they have tightly fitting lids and they work great for these explosions. Now, when we were transitioning from film cameras to digital, these things became hard to find, but now they’re available online. I’ve got in the show notes a link to an Amazon product that I’m happy with because you need good fitting lids and some of them available have loose fitting lids which leave you with questionable explosions.

And so let’s get to the DIY part of this process. So what you need is you need some of those film canisters filled about three quarters full of water and I’ve colored the water. You can do that too.

It makes for a more exciting explosion. Also makes it a little bit messier. You might wanna have a towel on hand.

I’ve got everything in a pie pan because that kinda contains the mess a little bit if you’re mess adverse. I also marked the lids with a Sharpie as you can see because that makes them a little bit easier to find when they hit the floor and they fly quite a ways. Usually they will hit the ceiling if you’re inside and then bounce.

If you’re outside, I’ve seen them go 20, 25 feet in the air. And then in addition to all of that stuff, you need some antacid tablets. Now Elka Seltzer is the go-to name brand I think in most places, but the generic store brands work just fine and cost less.

So they’re just little wafers. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna drop the wafers into the canisters, put the lids on real fast and some CO2 gas is gonna build up until there’s so many CO2 bubbles in there, they can’t contain themselves anymore literally and then they blow the top off of that film canister. After an explosion like this, if you refill the canister fast enough, there’s probably two or three explosions in each one of these wafers if you get them refilled and recapped really quick.

So let’s give it a go. I’m gonna try two at once. Oh, this is the exciting part, this waiting.

There, there we go. I just got pink and blue all over my computer. That was good fun.

So just for fun, oh, I got blur, excuse me. I got blurry because goo hit my camera. So the other day, just for fun, I filmed a couple explosions in slow motion and we’ll go out with those.

I love that pop. Also in the blog post I put up with this, I’ll have some pictures of some kids back in the day at that moment that explosions happens. I’ve got some photos.

Hope you like the idea. There’s a longer write up, including more information about the chemical process going on in an explosion. It’s a fun STEM exploration idea for kids and I promise you they will have a good time with it.

Okay, back from the video. I hope you enjoyed that. On to topic three and this, this is something kind of related to what we talked about before.

Seven common adult responses to child-led play. Now last episode, I talked about how play comes from the child. The spark for the play starts in here and that often leads to play that you may not care for or feel that you need to support.

Rough and tumble, death, weapons, those kind of thing and maybe all kinds of play that you’re cool with but our response to this kind of play matters and so I put together this kind of matrix of the different ways adults respond to kids’ choices in play and so I thought we could talk about it a little bit here. The link is in the show notes and you can check that out. It’s a one-page PDF that you can use yourself or share with others.

So one is, the first one is full support. This is cheering them on. This is intentionally devoting classroom space for the activities the kids are choosing to engage in.

That’s one way we should support them and ideally, that’s where we wanna get to with all of the types of play the kids are choosing as long as we’re also maintaining everybody else’s health and safety. The next one up there is passive acceptance. So sometimes we’ll just, maybe we’re not full support of it but we’re gonna let it happen and some of you might feel this way about weapons play or superhero play, those kind of things.

You know the kids are benefiting from it and you’re not a real big supporter but you’re gonna give them the autonomy to do their own thing. Next up is subtle disapproval. This is the silent critic.

This is we’re kind of clicking our tongue to ourself. We kind of undermine the freedom and self-direction by introducing doubt without clear interference. What this might look like is a caregiver shakes their head and frowns as children throw pretend punches during superhero play.

And so kids are getting the message that, yeah, this is still going on but is there something wrong with it because of the way their teacher, their adult, their parent is looking at them. And then there’s controlled play. This is where the freedom is lost.

Adults allow the activity but impose rules and boundaries that strip it of the freedom and self-direction essential to true play. So this is when we start moving away from Gray’s conditions of play and instead of being real play, it becomes more of a play-like activity because when it’s real play, the players are creating their own rules. When you start imposing your rules from the outside, you’re eroding that autonomy of that choice and you’re taking the play away from them.

So a concerned caregiver might allow the play as long as her rules are followed. You can wrestle as long as you stay in the grass and don’t get too wild or whatever it is. And again, it’s better than shutting down the play completely but it’s not as free as we had earlier on this continuum.

And then there’s directed play. It’s time for a change where the adult comes in and reduces self-direction by replacing child-led play with adult-imposed activities. The frustrated caregiver might snap.

This is getting out of control. Let’s stop wrestling and play a game of Simon Says. So we actually, in here we get into the actually shutting down the play.

And then there’s explicit rejection. This is a hard no. This is the kind of stuff that it starts and we shut it down right away.

Wrestling is not allowed here. Find something else to do. And so there’s not even a version of it that can be so forwarded.

And then finally there’s complete prohibition, not allowing it ever. No roughhousing it at preschool. If I catch you, there’s gonna be consequences.

And so those are some very distinct differences from fully supporting to complete prohibition. And so the challenge, I think, is to ask yourself where you are on that continuum and see if you can kind of move yourself up towards the more supportive versions of responding to those kinds of play. And so it’s just kind of a tool that can be used for checking where you are along those lines.

It might be, I don’t think it’s gonna change your life, but it might be a useful tool to check out. So that’s seven common adult responses to child-led play. What do we got next? Well, it’s time to wrap up this episode.

So first, check out the HQ self-care links. Invest time in self-care. You’re worth it.

The other thing I hear is you don’t have time. And look, time can be a real big thing. My suggestion is make time.

You might be doing versions of self-care that aren’t very effective, like scrolling social media, for example. And so taking some of that likely ineffective things you’re doing and look for more effective ways to take care of yourself would be beneficial. And there’s some links to help you in that direction over at the Playvolution HQ site.

Link is in the show notes. Amazon ID, I got for you this. Oh, we skipped the Amazon ID.

Amazon ID, I got for you this. But somebody’s just been buying their tea through the Amazon link. And this is a great way to buy the show.

If there’s something you’re buying on a regular basis over there at the Amazon and you wanna support the show, do that buying through my Amazon portal and it supports the website and the podcast and is greatly appreciated. So thank you if you’re doing that. Share it if you like it, the podcast and the links at Playvolution HQ.

And next week, we’re gonna get into mixed age groups. I’ve been tidying up the Playvolution HQ site so I’ve got some good links there for you. And we’ll delve into that.

That’s some Lillian cats probably coming at you next week. Dad joke of the week. Here we go, you ready for this? I’m reading a book on gravity.

It’s impossible to put down. Impossible. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast.

Thanks for listening. Back soon. Bye-bye.

Contribute content to Playvolution HQ
Brought to you by Explorations Early Learning

Browse Trainings

Podcast (playvolution-hq-podcast-audio): Play in new window | Download (32.4MB) | Embed