Hi, this is Janet Landsbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today I'm going to talk a little about

Yes Spaces. Yes Space is the term that I coined for Magda Gerber's concept for cultivating

your child's learning and creating through play by offering a 100% safe space.

Okay, so back to talking about Yes Spaces. First I want to give a little background. I first

used the term Yes Space. Actually I called it Yes Place, I think, in my post in 2010 called

Baby Interrupted, which was about how we can encourage a long attention span and encourage

play and encourage learning by being careful around interrupting children beginning as infants.

It's a normal thing that we all do that I did before I learned about this approach. We don't

consider that babies or young children are doing something of great value. So when we want to

show them something, tell them to look over here or we just want to say hi, we tend to interrupt.

And one of the ways that we interrupt children playing is when they are getting into inappropriate

things or doing something unsafe. So what Magda Gerber said is give them a 100% safe space,

which means enclosed. And a lot of people don't realize this part. Maybe they've heard the term Yes Space,

but they don't realize that that actually must mean the space is enclosed so that a child can't

wander out of it into an unsafe situation. So with this kind of space, we set children up for

success for them to explore as extensively as they need to within reason. Of course, if it's

long after lunchtime or there's another reason that we need to interrupt, then we do. But as much as

possible, we want to give them free reign to do what children do best, which is explore, learn.

They are the masters at this. So we trust them to develop their skills and follow their own

interests in this safe space where we're not having to say no, don't do this, don't do that.

When I first came online to share about Magda Gerber's approach to parenting, also known as the

Rai approach, and I termed it respectful parenting. When I first started doing this, it was late in 2009, and

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