There’s a Place: How Parents Help Their Children Create a Capacity for Playfulness and can it be Sustained across the Lifespan

ABSTRACT

This article traces the ways that playfulness shifts and grows with the child and with the parent-child dyad. It also speaks to the paradoxical manner in which feeling essential as a parent is both necessary at the beginning of the child’s life yet must evolve into relevance as the child’s autonomy warrants. Interestingly, grace and playfulness are both a content and a process in parenting. The playful parent’s wisdom produces a sense of grace over time just as it produces a way of being that the child can internalize so that they too can eventually parent with grace and fun should they so desire.

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Notes on contributors

Steve Tuber

Steve Tuber, PhD, ABPP, is Professor of Psychology, Program Head and Director of Clinical Training at the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the City College of New York, CUNY. He has authored or edited seven critically acclaimed books and presented and/or published over 150 papers on the intertwining aspects of the assessment and treatment of children and adolescents. He is the Editor of the book series Psychodynamic Treatment and Assessment in the 21st Century (Lexington Books) and is on the editorial boards of four psychodynamically-oriented journals.