The Intergenerational Play Project

The separation between parents and children, adolescents and family is so wide that we hardly recognize ourselves in each other. Our generations have become institutionally isolated, divided out into schools, businesses, factories, day care centers, hospitals, rest homes. Our days have become so filled with working and consuming, so consumed by "communication" that with have little time for ourselves, less time for each other, and no time for our community. The result is a steady deterioration of marriage and family, community and planet.

The Intergenerational Play Project is directed towards is the development of community-based experiential education programs in the art and wisdom of playing well with children--programs in intergenerational fun for people who live and/or work with children: parents, teens, teachers, recreators, caregivers.

We are very poorly informed about the art of playing with children. All we have to go by is our own childhood, and the vague memories of how adults played with us. If we do not pay careful attention, we find ourselves revisiting the very same inequities on our children, and ourselves. We get caught in the game, rather than the spirit of play, and do the violence to them that was done to us.

Playing well with children is an opportunity for deep growth, for the children, yes, but even more for teens, parents and grandparents. If we can learn to play consciously, lovingly, openly, our games can lead us to moments of profound spiritual union and rebirth. Our children become our mentors, revising our vision, increasing our compassion and our capacity for joy.

Our wholeness, as individuals, as families, neighbors, communities, nations, is dependent on a healthy and healing interdependence with our children. Playing well with children is in truth the only living connection we have with our childhood. As challenging as it can sometimes be, playing well with children is the best way we have to become fully adult.

 

Click on the Picnic Initiative for a modest proposal on how to implement Intergenerational silliness.