What Does Play Actually Do for a Gifted Child?

9 hours ago

13 min read

Playing with my child did not come naturally to me.

Some people are playful by nature. Mine had to be learned, honed, and grown. People are surprised to hear that about me.

Not only was it a skill I had to build, but it took considerable convincing before I would prioritise it at all, before I would spend my precious time on something I believed to be frivolous.

Play was for children. Children should play with children. Children are better off playing with children. And worse, I thought proper play could only happen between children. That me, an adult, was a stand-in. The poor cousin to what my child could have if I could just find him some "kids like him” for him to play with.

Even now I catch that tendency in myself.

What I did not know was that genuinely therapeutic play, the kind that moves the needle in dramatic ways on major elements of a child's life, calls for a specific types with a trusted and attuned adult.

If you have ever made the same assumption, you are in reasonable company. It is what most of us were told and had modelled to us.

It took having therapeutic play spelled out to me, specifically, and then applying it in my own home, witnessing the outcomes over time, before I was a convert.

The bottom line is that it works. It is one of the fastest routes I know to connect after separation, to repair after rupture, invite cooperation, recover after a setback, and to heal after a shock.

It is also how a child locks in a skill, processes a difficult concept, builds awareness, and learns something faster than any instruction of mine has ever managed. Not to mention giving stuck feelings a place to unravel and resolve with a little more grace.

In short, it’s the magic sauce in my parenting toolkit. And the best part is that it is repeatable, it is reliable, and you can use it tonight, in your own home.

Why does my gifted child fall apart over small things?

Picture the end of a day that, on paper, went relatively well.

There may have been a playgroup or a playdate. School drop off and pick up. Homework that got done, a music lesson, sport. Siblings who saw eye to eye for most of it.

And then, somewhere near the end, the whole thing came apart. Seemingly over nothing.

Tears. Temper. Raised voices, or a slammed door. A refusal to cooperate, a refusal to contribute. Lashing out, or withdrawing entirely.

The picture looks different for different temperaments and different circumstances. The mechanism underneath is usually the same.

Despite our societal narrative, it is almost never melodrama. It is most often an accurate report of the internal landscape at that moment. Your child is telling their truth. Not the truth. Their truth.

Aware Parenting, developed by the Swiss-American developmental psychologist Dr Aletha Solter, offers one of the clearest accounts of this. All behaviour arises from one of three sources.

What is underneath	What it looks like	What it asks for
A lack of information	Genuine not-knowing, a misread situation, missing context	Give the information
An unmet need	Hunger, tiredness, sensory overload, too long without connection, or something less obvious going unmet	Meet the need
Accumulated feelings	A disproportionate meltdown, a tiny trigger, a flood	Listening, and allowing the release

Those rows need expanding before they are much use to a parent of a gifted child.

On the first, I talk about stage-appropriate information rather than age-appropriate information. A gifted child frequently needs an explanation that would be considered years beyond them in a way that is not shocking, which I have heard referred to as “the radical truth in a non dramatic container.”

On the second, needs run well past food, sleep, warmth and proximity. Children need agency. They need a sense of competency. They need to have impact and influence in their own world. And they need to be allowed to depend on the adults who care for them, which is a need our culture is oddly uncomfortable with.

And the third row? Almost nobody taught us what to do with the third row. It is not intuitive because almost nobody did it for us. There is a form of deep empathic listening I teach that frees up child and parent so feelings to be expressed instead of suppressed.

These three places are where we can gain real traction in parenting. And it is where play, done on purpose, does the thing nothing else in my toolkit does.

What is play actually doing?

Here is the reframe the whole piece rests on.

Not all behaviour needs to be corrected. Some behaviour is an invitation. To play. To connect. To heal. To grow.

Play is not a break from development. It is where a great deal of development happens. A child at play is not resting from the work of growing up. They are doing it.

In my observation across twenty-five years of practice, play is doing four distinct things at once: consolidating what a child has learned, making abstract ideas tangible, embedding skills so they hold up under pressure, as well as metabolising feelings that have nowhere else to go.

Watch a child in the week after a hospital visit and you might see the ordinarily ignored doctor's kit out on the floor. Watch after a hard day at school and someone will be running a classroom in the lounge room, with all the power in their hands this time.

None of this is a child dwelling on it. It’s a child filing it.

The same holds for skills and for ideas and understandings. A concept that struggles to go in through verbal explanation, or visual flow charts, might land through a game. A skill rehearsed in play is a skill that holds up later, when it counts.

There is some fascinating developmental neuroscience underneath all of this, and I will come back to it properly in the series of emails that will follow this article.

If you are not on my email list yet there is a link at the bottom of this page to sign up.

The moment a parent comes at a child with a playful response instead of a punishment, a threat, a bribe, a reprimand, a lecture, or even a helpful suggestion, something opens. You might notice something flicker in their eyes. A light come on inside. Depending on how long and how firmly they have been shut down, it can take a hot minute, but it comes. And it is unmistakable.

Children respond to an invitation to play almost without exception. After all, play is their primary language. It is what they already intuitively know to be the most effective route through whatever is plaguing them, holding them back, or delighting them.

They are crushed when that inclination is shut down, and they are lit up when it is encouraged.

Before I go into more detail, there is something that parents aren’t always aware of.

Immediately after a good play session, a child may cry, or get upset, or have a tantrum. You might already be nodding. You may be recalling a time you have thrown your own hands up in despair, lamenting "but we were having such a good time!"

That is not the play failing. That is the play working. The nervous system discharging tension, not just becasue it is safe to do so, but becasue it is what makes the most sense to do next.

The tension that may have been bought about by a day peppered with misunderstandings, false accusations, confusing and conflicting thoughts, helplessness, fear, worry, and the disappointment of every unexpected outcome, setback or challenge that was not heard in the moment. Needs that went unmet for whatever reason. Being overlooked, ignored, or rejected. Not feeling able to speak up, or speaking up and having it ridiculed, or dismissed.

And the thousand small things that seem so unreasonable to us but are not unreasonable at all. Not being able to reach the doorknob. Having to stop mid-activity when they were in flow. Being left with someone they do not know well. Along with everything running in their imagination, which for these children can be alot: the horror of one animal eating another, or the fact that the sun will one day die.

Once the frustration has vented, once the skill has consolidated, once the difficult concept has been worked as far as it can be worked, once their is an attuned adult present and available, what is often left is looks a lot like grief and the tears might start to flow

Gordon Neufeld calls these the tears of futility. I love seeing tears in that light. The tears that come with accepting the things we cannot change. Tears, through this lense, are now seen as an extraordinarily mature move. Children get this right far more often than adults do. Sometimes we simply have to cry for the sheer impossibility of a thing, and most importantly, those tears need to be witnessed and held by someone who loves us.

Because on the other side of them, this child will be holding every bit of their agency for the things that can change, and the problems they can solve. I have seen time and again children making their own empowered meaning and then moving toward their own solutions.

Which brings me to the most useful thing I know about play.

What a child plays is not random. They select the material accurately. Left to lead, they will reliably choose the exact thing that most needs attention, often before anyone else has noticed its needed.

Our job as parents is not to design the play. Our job is to watch for it and to join in when we can.

And to trust the process.

What is Attachment Play?

Play is an enormous field, worked over by a great many people, and my understanding of it is built from more than one of them.

Attachment Play is from Dr Aletha Solter of the Aware Parenting Institute. In her book, Attachment Play: How to Solve Children's Behavior Problems with Play, Laughter, and Connection, she maps out nine specific forms of play designed to heal childhood stress and build cooperation. It is one framework within the wider field, and the one I rely on, as it's the most practical map I have found.

The nine Solter identifies and described are:

Power-Reversal Games. The child is big and strong, you are small and weak. For powerlessness. They win and you lose (theatrically).
Nonsense Games. You get things gloriously, confidently, ridiculously wrong. For rigidity and perfectionism.
Separation Games. Disappearing and reliably reappearing. For anything to do with leaving.
Contingency Games. The same delightful thing, every single time. For a world that has stopped feeling predictable.
Physical Contact Games. Wrestling, chasing, roughhousing with warmth. For the inordinate amount of touch that is necessary as a human.
Non-Directed Child-Centred Play. They lead entirely, you follow their instruction. For allowing whatever is, to emerge.
Regression Play. Being little again, on purpose, with permission, with celebration. For growing up faster than is comfortable.
Cooperative Games. Playing competitively with one another, on the same team, rather than against. For when cooperation is waning.
Symbolic Play. The scene acted out again and again. For anything too large, frightening, or confusing to say directly.

Knowing the nine is orientation.

Knowing which one, and when, to what degree, and how to stay when the play opens something bigger, is the walk we take with our own child, in our own family, in our own circumstances.

Why do gifted children need more of this, not less?

Many parents tell me their gifted child has a quirky sense of humour that is often misunderstood, or met with blank stares by their age-mates, and that this sits at the root of a much of their isolation.

Which goes a long way to answering the belief I opened with.

Gifted children also have wider apertures on almost everything. This is the territory the Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski mapped as the overexcitabilities, and it is a truly useful lens for what these children actually experience. They move through a world carrying far more stimuli.

They also perceive more of the paradox, the apathy and the conflict in our world, and a great many more warped mirrors that distort their understanding of themselves. They also carry more creativity, more vision, more possibility and more raw potential than most of us can get our heads around.

All of those compounds and there is a cost when it has nowhere to go.

When gifted children learn that their responses to this load are too much for the people who love them, they begin trading who they are for the belonging they need. They do this young, and they get good at it. (I have written elsewhere about why gifted kids fall apart at home and hold it together everywhere else, and about the role of humour in supporting bright kids.)

Play speeds all of this up. The filing, the consolidating, the making sense of a world that comes at a higher volume than most, and finally releasing what is left through tears of futility.

Formal therapeutic support is a fine thing and I recommend it in many cases. But imagine adding rocket fuel to a child's own innate processes simply by participating in their world alongside them.

My work is helping you leverage what you already hold.

Play is their primary language, it is how they live in a world of constant resolution. And for the most part, our job is to get on board with what they are already doing.

This asks for no equipment, no space, no travel, and no particular shape of family. It asks for an attentive parent at reliable times of the day or week throughout childhood.

Where does this not work?

Where there is no safety.

Play is not a way through danger. It is what becomes possible once safety is present. If a family is not safe for any reason, then safety is the work. Safety comes first, and play waits for it.

Although this paragraph is small, the caveat is not. Safety is not negotiable.

How do I actually start?

Two beliefs stop most parents, and both of them are unhelpful.

The first is all-or-nothing. I already lost my cool, so it is too late to play. It is never too late. A parent can pivot mid-sentence, from punitive to playful, and the child will join in. Perhaps not instantly, depending on the moment. But in a decade of teaching this to parents I have not yet met one who tried it and found they had left it too late.

The second is about capacity. I am too exhausted for this.

Play is like a muscle. And any muscle, can be grown. It might start small, and the reps and the sets want to match the rate and pace of your own nervous system and might include things like your own childhood experience of play, and your own reflexive responses to what your child brings.

So perhaps think about starting with just one style and making it yours.

I began with power-reversal games and got genuinely good at them. After that I started responding to whatever my child brought me.

Everyone's starting point is different. For very young children, power-reversal games are king. For older children, a good place to begin might be protected, named time each week for what Solter calls non-directed child-centred play. Put it in the diary and treat it the way you would treat a meal, because that is roughly what it is.

However you decide to do it, in the next few weeks, if you are on my email list, you will be receiving a deeper dive into how this works and an orientation into how it would look in your unique family.

If you are not on the list and want to be, the link to join is at the end.

Key takeaways

What is Attachment Play? The term Dr Aletha Solter gave to the deliberate therapeutic use of play, honed into nine distinct styles, each suited to a different kind of stuck feeling.

Why does my gifted child melt down over small things? Because behaviour comes from a lack of information, an unmet need, or accumulated feelings. The third is the one most of us were never taught to meet.

How many styles of Attachment Play are there? Nine.

Does my child crying after play mean it went wrong? No. This kind of release after play is common, and it is usually the sign that something has moved.

The widening

Here is what I have watched happen over time with play installed into the flow of the household.

Helplessness does not take root. A child who plays learns, in their body rather than in theory, that they can have impact and influence in the world.

They grow into young people with a real sense of agency and the competency to match it. Confident to try, new things, able to move through failure, willing to go again.

They become people who will push back on systems and structures that do not work, not to be contrary, because they never had to accept an unworkable situation as non-negotiable.

They take responsibility. They look for ways to contribute. They collaborate readily, because they have learned that whatever comes up can be worked through with real outcomes.

A child whose feelings had somewhere to go becomes an adult who can stay present to their own, and to other people's.

That is what I think we are actually doing when we wholeheartedly engage in this type of play.

A closing invitation

As some of you already know, I come from a family of hikers.

My father took great pride in walking me and my siblings up peaks and along trails, carrying tents, water and food. Since then, I have taken multi-day hikes in almost every state of Australia, as well as throughout the world. My grandfather conceived a two hundred and fifty kilometre walking track through Victoria's south west, and then spent years on the ground building it, alongside a local high school and its families.

On a long walk you head out with a set of problems and you come back with resolutions.

This is a long walk.

This article is the map.

And it is spread out here on the table before you decide to go.

Over the next eight (or so) weeks I am sending a series called Genius At Play. Eight (or so) emails, each one taking a bite sized piece of this and putting it in your hands to try in your home, with your child.

If you are on my email list you need do nothing but open them when they come.

There is a live online session with Mensa Australia on 21 October, where I will bring it all together.

In early November, I will host a conversation at the Annual Mensa Conference, where I will ask parents what they found to be true about play and write a follow up piece here.

Hopefully you will see yourself in it, and your own family, as well as the research and the experience of others. Not just becasue I tell you about it, but because you will have walked it yourself.

If you would like to take the journey and are not yet on my mailing list, sign up here.

And if a parent came to mind while you were reading this, please send it to them.

Devon Harris is a gifted parenting educator working with families worldwide. She holds a BA in Child and Adolescent Development (Youth Studies) and is a Child and Adolescent Behavioural Specialist. She spent fifteen years working directly with children and young people, and the decade since working with their parents. She swims in Lake Daylesford most mornings, regardless of the season, and writes from Daylesford, Victoria, on Dja Dja Wurrung country. devonharris.com.au