Alice Reinhardt: 00:00:00.000
What happens in play, okay, is that they will create scenarios that they have to problem-solve. And that’s the biggie. That’s the thing that we want to see in our children, is that they know how to solve problems. But that’s not something that you sit down and just teach them and say, “Okay, today we’re going to learn how to problem solve.” No, that happens in their play. And that’s when one of those synapses form. [music]

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:31.165
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show And I have to tell you, I am so excited about having this conversation with my sweet friend Alice Reinhardt. We speak at conferences together. We have the opportunity to spend time together on the conference circuit. And we really are twin daughters of different mothers. Good Lord, we even dressed alike by accident today and didn’t–

Alice Reinhardt: 00:00:55.602
I know. That’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? I mean, we are connected in this frontal lobe.

Gretchen Roe: 00:01:00.882
Absolutely. So, Alice, I’m going to let you introduce yourself and then we’re going to get started.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:01:06.228
Hi, folks. My name is Alice Reinhardt. And as Gretchen said, we’re kind of like co-partners in crime. When we do these sessions together, it’s always a lot of fun to do them with her. I am what’s known as a pioneer homeschooler. As we started educating our children at home in the early eighties, it wasn’t even legal in all the states then, and so I continued at it for 35 years, seven children. And just as a little aside, after my children all flew the nest or we kicked them out or whatever we did– and by the way, I will point out, Gretchen, all seven of my children are still alive and I’m not in jail. And I consider that as a win for just 35 years of home-educating seven children. But anyhow, after my children finally left home, I decided to go back to school. And I happened to be halfway through a master’s of psychology degree and loving it, loving it, loving it. So there is proof that you never, never stop learning, and so, yeah. But this is one of my favorite, favorite sessions to do. Of course, I could say that about all of them. And I always like to have a little bit of fun.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:02:38.337
Something that I’ve learned is that my audience, they’re broken up into two groups. There are those who are natural players that can jump in at any moment and just have fun and be imaginary and all of that. And then there’re people, like me, who are the type A. And I had to learn about this because two of my children were born in Liberia. And so it was their learning problems that led me to learn about play and the important role of play in this. So there’s people like me, the type A, when I play, I’m in it to win it. And I’m not very imaginative. I’m a very creative person, but I’m not very imaginative when it comes to just free play and all of that. And so I can start off getting people to identify with what type of person you are by how you’re responding to what I’m doing to these two colors of playdough. I’ve got green and the purple. And I want you to know I never watch myself when I do this, okay? I only do it so that the audience can see. Ad there there will be people. So that’s when I’ll say, okay, who have I just stressed out by mixing the playbook?

Alice Reinhardt: 00:04:07.206
Yes, I knew. Yes, I knew this. And actually, I thought you were– you could be– you could go either way because you can– but I also know you like to win, too, so. And then there are people that are like, “Oh, I was sitting there and I was mesmerized by it, and I was thinking of all the wonderful things that those two colors could make.” Well, that’s the automatic right there. All right. That if mixing the play dohs together is something that you don’t do – yeah – you are definitely in this session to learn about the reasoning why. So far as that type A person who needs to understand why it’s important for me to do this, we’re going to answer that. For that person who can naturally play and they can see all the beauty in those two colors, we’re going to validate you, and we’re going to give you things so that you can say when people say, “What you’re playing? Is that all you do,” you have a good answer for that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:12.803
I know that’s hard for me because I watched my children play, and they would ask me to enter in with them, and that was really hard for me. I was born a tiny adulthood, and I’m an only child, so I didn’t learn to play with other people, and that’s hard. And we have to take those things into consideration when we’re teaching our kids about play, don’t we?

Alice Reinhardt: 00:05:35.240
You do. You really do. Plus, I don’t think most people realize that there is actually a cognitive development that is happening when children play. And for, especially for the type A people, we’re always going, “Well, you’re going to grow out of that,” or “They need to grow out of it,” or “Let’s get serious. It’s time to do schoolwork.” And because they don’t see, oh, there’s actual things happening in their brain. Actually, this just happened recently in one of my psych classes where I read the article that said it takes 400 repetitions of doing something for a synapse to form. Do you ever get tired of having your child repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, and it’s like, enough already, enough already. Or if you have a child that’s in the knock-knock joke stage, and you’re finding all different kinds of ways to laugh at that. Well, it’s because what is happening in that child when they are doing this repetitiveness, it’s not something that’s a conscious thing. Their brain is driving them because it is forming a synapse in there. And I’m just really grateful that at my age, I can still have synapses form. And I think that’s the thing that we need to be aware of, too, that it’s not just something that ends at a certain age or when your prefrontal cortex is formed and all of that. Play is not defined. And again, in a psych course, just my last psych course, I was reading on this, no one will define it. The AAAP won’t, the American Association of Pediatrics. Child Learning Specialists won’t define it. They will talk about the attributes of play. So what is happening in this play? First of all, it is done simply for the sake of playing. And it’s not anything that you have to motivate them. I mean, when was the last time you ever said, if you’ll go play, I’ll give you an M&M. You never have to bribe kids to play. You never have to convince them to do this. And for a child, when they enter into play, they are in a another zone, and they are in another universe, another just– well, this call is a time warp. And so what happens, what happens as parents is that we’ll say, “Hey, it’s time to eat, and they just keep playing,” or, “It’s time to go. I told you it was time to go.” Well, you think a parent, the natural thing that a parent thinks is that this is an intentional thing on their part, that they’re being disrespectful or they’re being disobedient, and that is not the case. They are so in their world, they don’t hear you, okay? Your voice doesn’t even make it on the scene. So sometimes what you need to do is you just need to go up and touch them, and that breaks that world that they are in.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:49.740
So we’re so involved in play that we’re nothing thinking– we’re not striving to be disobedient, we’re just in the moment there, and totally absorbed.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:09:01.555
That is exactly right. There’s a whole new world that they’ve created there.

Gretchen Roe: 00:09:05.746
Why do preschoolers love repetition? Each of their brain cells can have 15,000 connections, or synapses, to other brain cells. So how do they strengthen those neural pathways? And you say, by using them. But can you give us some examples of that?

Alice Reinhardt: 00:09:21.911
When Freeman and Viv came to us from Liberia, and they were, I don’t know, 5 and 7, I think. And we knew to expect for them to be delayed, right? And so I waited a while. I waited a good while before we started doing school with them. But when I started– and I started like, oh, maybe I would with a 3-year-old, and we draw a line down. They could not imitate that, Gretchen. And by that, I mean if I drew a line down, they would draw it across or they would draw it angular. It wasn’t anything. So when I spoke to some early childhood development, that’s when they said, “Tell me about them as an infant. Did they crawl?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And so what they explained is that things like crawling, it forms a peg that later learning comes and hangs on that peg. So what we did for our kids is that– here they were 8, 6, 7. We took them back to an 18 month old toy, a shape sorter.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:10:35.778
The first time that my Viv sat down to do a shape sorter, it took her 30 minutes, and that was with assistance from me. They could not figure out the three dimensional one in your hand with the flat dimension of just putting it in a hole. And so we spent a good two years with playing games that used logic, legos. Not the type of games that you have to think about a skill to do it. No, these were just games that had them thinking, using their hands to complete a task. And so just things like allowing your children to problem– or what happens in play, okay, is that they will create scenarios that they have to problem-solve. And that’s the biggie. That’s the thing that we want to see in our children, is that they know how to solve problems. But that’s not something that you sit down and just teach them. Say, “Okay, today we’re going to learn how to problem-solve.” No, that happens in their play. And that’s when one of those synapses form. What has happened in just a short synopsis of history here is that we obviously don’t want children hurt. We’ve made things too safe for them. We’ve taken out the merry go rounds that we would just be drug to death on. It’s kept children from playing.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:12:17.261
They learn in risky moments. Risk is necessary to form conclusions. If I go up the slide, all right, what is happening in that? Well, there’s that kind of danger. It’s like you got to figure out how to turn your body to get up that slide, and, oh, and then you slip and you come down. Well, that’s gravity working. And so then you have to figure out, “Well, then how do I climb up this slide and get to the top and be victorious?” I might’ve been one that said, “No, we don’t go up the slide.” It’s a good time to teach your children manners, and if there’s somebody waiting to come down, all right, you let them come down, and then if it’s a sibling and they come down, they learn what it means when they– moving force. It’s a solid object there, and they go flying off. But it’s a matter, Gretchen, of allowing our children to take the risk.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:16.013
I think one of the things, though, that’s really important, Alice, is we have become a society that has become so protective of our children that we don’t want them to get scraped knees. We don’t want them to try dangerous things, and because of that, I think we’ve created a bunch of kids who are hesitant to do things. I was thinking about this last night, and remember several years ago when a neighbor down the street called me and said, “Do you realize your boys are on the roof of your house?” and I said, “Oh, yeah, I put the ladder up so that they could get up there.” And she said, “Are you crazy?” and I said, “No, they’re actually up there running a science experiment,” [laughter] and I think they were 6 and 10 at the time or 6 and 12 at the time, and she said, “Well, okay.” She said, “I just hope they bounce really well,” and I said, “Well, I told them if they fell off, they needed to make sure they fell off the front of the house because that was only one story. If they fell off the back of the house, it would be two,” and I know to this day– she’s a very dear friend, but I know in that moment, she thought it was crazy.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:14:25.621
Right, right. And Gretchen, that is a very valid thing. We do want to protect our children. Two years ago, Great Britain started writing, studying this, and realizing we have children who are hampered intellectually, and it’s because we’ve been too protective of them, and so they were trying to write another like, “Okay, this is what you need to be doing with your children.” And our current AAP, American Academy of Pediatrics, sent out probably about three years ago to pediatricians telling them to prescribe play. True story. This happened to a friend of mine with her teenagers. “We’re going to prescribe play because parents do not know how to let that happen.” All right. So yeah, we’ve gone too far on this, and that pendulum needs to swing back. Speaking of swings, when my older kids were younger and my son was just so energetic, I would say, “Go run around the house. Go make laps around the house, and that would take some of it off,” right? When Viv came home, and because of her learning issues, when she would get stuck, I would send her out to swing. I did not know at the time what swinging does, and it’s very fascinating. When you hold a baby– I know very few people who would just stand still when they hold a baby. There’s this it’s natural movement. I can pick up a doll, and will start swaying with that. But when a child swings, all right, there’s a regulation that is happening in their brain. It’s settling the inner ear. It’s resetting everything in their brain. And that motion in there, a lot of times, will just settle their brain down. She could come back in after being outside for 15, 20 minutes, and she was ready to learn the thing that she was sitting on wall with.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:31.120
Right. And I think it also makes a tremendous amount of difference when we can recognize that in order for our children to have small muscle movement, they have to have large muscle movement first. You said something about crawling, and I think this is a really super important thing that I want to reemphasize for parents. My fifth kid didn’t crawl. He just stood up one day and walked off, and thought that also my child who had dyslexia. And when we started working with a neurodevelopmentalist, she insisted that he go back to crawling, and he could not– if we said March, he would pick up his left foot and left hand instead of right foot, left hand. And it took us almost a year to get that cross patterning, but you got to have that cross patterning in order to be able to read.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:17:25.945
You do. And now I will– I mean, actually, you pretty well described me, okay? Because I did the same thing. Now, I didn’t struggle with dyslexia, but I struggle with other things. And the very fascinating thing is that here we’re back to talking about synapses again, right, for patients who have had strokes, all right, they have to be taught how to crawl again depending on where the, where the stroke happened in their brain. But you can crawl up a wall, and you can practice crawling like that. And the thing is that for me to do that, I have to think so hard. I have to think so hard. Right hand, left knee. Okay? Left hand, right knee. Because I can do the same thing as your son when I walk, I can keep my right side going and my left side going, and it doesn’t mess me up. And I can change in the middle of it and not missed a step, so again, it shows that those little things like that, the large muscle groups, which I will say this, Gretchen. On large muscle groups, what does a three-year old do? They run, right? And you tell them to stop, and maybe they will, but then they run again. And they run again and again. Here we are as parents. We go, “You’re not obeying me. You’re being disobeyed. You’re being defiant.” When, no, in actuality, that three-year old’s brain is telling him run because at three is when your large muscle groups start developing. And in order for that to happen, they’ve got to be use it. The same concept with the synapses. In order for them to be developed, they have to be used.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:14.592
Catherine’s given us a great observation here. She said they bought a hammock chair and have seen a beautiful benefit to the student. I would love a hammock chair. That would be amazing. I think that’s terrific.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:19:29.110
So it produces that same sensation of just that swinging back and forth. Plus the thrill. I mean, I can remember as a child, you want to see how high you can go, and then if you can jump. I would never jump today, but I can remember doing that as a child and being thrilled by that. Just going so high and so excited with that. In one of those six things of risky play that grave talks about, he talks about the rough and tumble and he even uses the example in the animal kingdom. Baby animals, they rough and they tumble and they jump and they fight. Oh, my goodness. I have two german shepherds and when they are young and they’re fighting, you’re thinking that it is a massive dog attack going on. But as mammals, that is in us to play and to be rough and tumble and all of my grandkids have grown up knowing that Caleb was the uncle, that if you wanted to get into a wrestling match, you pull it on with him. And now that’s an incredibly safe way. And I’m not saying a child wouldn’t get hurt on that because sometimes they do. But that’s a very safe arena for children to play. There was a question that was submitted. It was like, what boundaries do you need to have an adults playing? It is important to give our child a voice and that they can be heard. And if they say the word, “No, I don’t want to do that,” that needs to be respected. I hate that we have to do the stranger danger, but it’s not just stranger danger that we have to be aware of, but it’s other adults that are close to us. So I encourage you to play rough and tumble with your childhood. But if at any point, if someone is playing with your child and you hear them say, or you can talk to them, “Do you ever feel uncomfortable with this?” That child has got to have the freedom to say, “I don’t like this,” and that needs to be respected. Else it happens when children are allowed free play, and that is they are creating scenarios in their mind and during or in their play.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:22:07.740
And these scenarios typically will have your child experiencing emotions that they don’t normally don’t have, like maybe fear or anger or fierce, that type of thing, they’re playing around with those emotions. They’re identifying with those emotions. For around the age of three and four, you’ll start hearing a child say, “Oh, you’re my best friend.” Okay, this is my best friend. Because when they start out, when they’re babies, it’s very singular playing. Two year olds don’t share real well, okay? They can play independently. As they get older, as they get three and four, they start interacting and playing with others. And what happens here is it is a great social experiment. It’s just fabulous. And as they get older, and if you’ve had girls, you’re going to hear conversations like this, okay, we’re going to play princess and the maid. You’re going to be the maid, and we’re going to– I’m going to say, da da da da da, and you’re going to say that, and then I’m going to say this, and then you’re say that, and then they stop and they act that out, and then they recreate the next scene with that. All right? And so in that, there’s a lot of social things happening. There’s an order. A social order. I’m the queen, you’re the princess, you’re the maid. And typically, it’s the older child calling that, that role up here. But there’s a development of vocabulary that happens when they’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to say this, and we’re going to create. We’re going to go to market.” So that’s another imaginative thing that happens when these kids are in this sacred place of this new world that they’ve created. I have a slide of our Lucy Pearl when she was about three or four, and she’s got this look on her face, right? And what had happened at the moment in time we were playing, or Mark was playing, my husband was playing scary bear with them. And scary bear comes from Laura Ingalls Wilder story of living in the big woods. And Charles would do up his hair, and he would go chasing after them. It’s been something that my husband played with our kids until they got tired of playing with it, right? And so he was playing with the grandkids, and so the bear kept coming after Lucy, and finally she put up her feet at him like this and went, shh. Mark is like, what? What is that? She said, it’s magic spray to make you disappear. In that scenario, she had a problem. Scary bear was always getting her, and she solved it by spraying the disappearing spray at him. You can tell the teenagers who have not played because they can’t figure out how to fix things or how to do things in their ability to problem solve, they need those synapses formed, okay, so that they can problem solve.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:25:29.812
In the movie Apollo 13, where it is showing what happened to our astronauts as they were attempting to land on the moon. This was going to be the first men to land on the moon. And when one of the rockets that was in the secondary propulsion of their capsule exploded, it tore up a part of their equipment. This is where we got the phrase, Houston, we have a problem. All right? And so in this whole scenario in this movie of trying to get them back. There was a scene in which the doctors came to them and they said, “Our guys, there’s nothing to filter their carbon dioxide because they got damaged.” And so there’s this great scene of the typical-looking engineers with the pocket protectors and the pins. And they have all this garbage, it looks like garbage, this is all the loose stuff that’s in that capsule, and they dump it on the tables. And they explained to them, to the scientists or to the engineers, that they had to create something that would fit the filters. They had to take something that was square and turn it into something round using the tools they had. Okay? That’s the scenario. They saved the lives of our astronauts. Now, the important thing of that is that Caltech was the university that fed the astronaut or fed the engineers for NASA, right? When those engineers retired, Caltech was filling up the best scores from MIT, from Stanford, from all of this. And they got kids in there that didn’t know how to problem solve. They could not repeat what these engineers did. They could write the problems on paper. They couldn’t figure it out. Short end of that story is that they discovered that asking their applicants how they played as a child affected whether or not they would get received into Caltech. Because what they had learned is that in play with a child, taking things apart or then building something, and it doesn’t work, and they rebuild it, when they problem solve, that stays with them. And that is what these engineers that are going on into the astronaut program and space program need to be able to solve the problems. And I find that just a very– again, if you’re needing encouragement to get your child to– to be okay about your child playing, the development of that problem solving skill is just at the top of the list with that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:24.755
Well, it’s interesting you should say that. I just finished reading Lenore Skenazy’s book about Free-Range Kids, and she talks about giving our children freedom without worry. And we’ve changed so much of society. I was the generation where my children come in when the streetlights come on. And we don’t allow kids to do that anymore. So we’ve got to create intentional opportunities for kids to be able to have these kinds of play scenarios. So what would your closing words be to our listeners today?

Alice Reinhardt: 00:29:04.339
Play is a beautiful thing, and it is a natural thing that God has put in us. He is a playful God. And if you could just kind of get a glimpse into that as you are encouraging your children to play, that it’s so much more– it’s so much more than play. Just let them be in their world. Let them experience the world. And then I’d say, do that for yourself, too. Learn to just walk out and say, “Oh, that sunshine feels just glorious in that.” But it’s a good thing we never outgrow it. We never outgrow it.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:52.889
I think one of the things that has happened is we’ve gotten these little computers that sit in our pocket. We have forgotten the ability to think creatively and think outside the box and be imaginative. And that imagination is what brought us to this ability to have these little computers in our pocket. And so we need to help our children in the next generation be able to have that as well. Alice, I want to say thank you for putting up with the technology today and for sharing this hour with me. I so greatly appreciate it. And I appreciate everyone who joined us live today. Thank you all for trusting us to come into your living rooms, and we’ll look forward to you all joining us again soon. Take care, everybody. Have a wonderful afternoon.

Alice Reinhardt: 00:30:40.802
Bye.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:42.084
Bye-bye.
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