The 5-minute daily playtime ritual that can get your kids to listen better

Life Kit

NPR

Self-improvement, Kids & Family, Education, Health & Fitness, Business

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Children's health professionals widely recommend a strategy known as 'special time' to help reduce behavioral issues in young children. This episode explains how to do it and why this simple and free tool is so powerful. This episode originally ran October 17, 2022.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
0:04.5	Hey everybody, it's Mariel.
0:06.5	And with us, I have Beck Harlan, Life Kit's visuals editor.
0:10.9	Hi, Mariel.
0:12.1	Hey.
0:13.0	I have something I really want you to listen to.
0:15.7	Ooh, let's hear it.
0:17.9	That is so tall, Gus.
0:20.2	That's so tall. So tall. So so tall that must be one of the tallest Lego
0:25.2	airplanes i've ever seen wow wow oh my god okay this is really really sweet
0:33.8	I just what am I actually listening to you don't just want to like listen to me and my two-year-old
0:39.6	play with Legos? Kind of do, though, all day, but yeah. I know. It's really cute, right? But what if I told
0:46.7	you that we're actually engaging in a research-backed practice that's proven to strengthen a caregiver's
0:52.3	relationship with their child.
0:55.4	Well, that sounds very official.
0:58.2	I know, right? I'm excited to share this tool with you.
1:02.9	I've been nerding out over this behavior management technique all week.
1:05.2	It's called special time.
1:06.3	That's it?
1:07.8	That's it. Special time.
1:17.0	A more formal way of describing it would be child-directed interaction or child-directed therapeutic play, but commonly, it's known as Special Time.
1:18.7	Okay, so what is it?
	...

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