Making Independent Play Work for You and Your Child (Brilliant Examples From My Inbox)

Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled

JLML Press

Kids & Family, Parenting

4.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You've no doubt heard by now about the countless benefits of our children's self-directed play. Less understood is how to nurture this invaluable instinct in our babies—every child has it. With our good intentions, though, we sometimes get in the way of play. Perhaps we intervene and unnecessarily interrupt our children's process. Or, as our kids get older, we let structured activities and excursions usurp the time they might have preferred to spend exploring, experimenting, following their own interests, and creating activities—doing what may look like "less" on the outside, but gaining profound benefits. In this episode, Janet shares letters from parents who describe eye-opening experiences that caused them to recognize the importance of allowing their children—who are from 3 months old to 3 years old—to play their own way, and how the simple act of not intervening brought them joy and a new understanding of their child and the value of play. Janet's "No Bad Kids Master Course" is at: ⁠⁠nobadkidscourse.com⁠⁠. Please support our sponsors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Janet Lansfury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to share your stories.
0:09.0	This is my favorite thing to do, not only because I love hearing about your experiences and I'm so grateful that you share with me, but also because I feel like as a parent, hearing other parents' stories of how it's working
0:23.6	for them can be instructive and encouraging and motivating.
0:29.1	I've shared two of these podcast episodes this year that are about success stories.
0:34.5	The first one was back in January.
0:39.4	Crying, screaming, resisting,
0:45.9	sadness, your best responses to your kids' emotions. And then a bit later, I think it was in the spring, discipline that works, your best responses to your kids' behaviors. So if you
0:52.4	haven't checked those out, you may wish to. If you were like me
0:55.9	and you really enjoy hearing stories from parents. In this episode, I'm excited to share
1:02.7	stories about play, how it's going with parents who want to encourage their kids to gain
1:10.3	all the benefits of self-directed play.
1:14.8	All kinds of play has benefits, right?
1:17.0	Playing with us, playing with peers.
1:19.6	It's nothing but positive, and it's the best way for children to learn, build social skills, explore creativity.
1:27.1	It has therapeutic value. Being able to play, we tend to
1:31.6	play out experiences that maybe trouble us or confuse us. Children have all these incredible instincts
1:39.6	to learn this way. And it takes a lot off our plate, right? Because we can allow them to do all these
1:46.7	things that we thought maybe we had to teach them or show them. And we find that they could learn
1:52.5	most of these concepts naturally. They're motivated to from infancy. So before I share these stories, I just want to offer a few basic guidelines
2:05.0	that I recommend for encouraging children's interdirected instinctive play. I often also call it
2:12.0	independent play because it's not dependent on any other kind of entertainment. It's all coming from their own ideas.
2:20.1	So how do we encourage this? We value play. We know that every child can do this, and every child
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