Hannah Beach | The Importance of True Play in Children’s Development

Autogenerated Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 00:00
Today we're together with Hannah Beach. And first of all, Hannah, it is good to see you and welcome to our little podcast.

Hannah Beach: 00:08
Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Jesper Conrad: 00:12
Yeah. I know you are deeply interested in play and what it does for parents and children and students. So can you find a good place for us to start? I don't know if we should define what play is, because for some people, play might be, oh, I'm playing because I play soccer every week or baseball, but that is maybe not true play. So where are you?

Hannah Beach: 00:45
All right. Okay, it's a big question. But it's yeah, it's true. Like when I think of play and you think of play, or other people think play, we all may have different ideas in our head. But I guess if you look at sort of what's happening right now, but I kind of answer this in a big way, is that in Western culture or cultures that sort of emulate Western type living, we've replaced play with what we would call entertainment. So play has been replaced with entertainment. So entertainment is kind of like an in-breath, kind of a whereas play was always nature's outbreath, kind of the big, and it's like we've got kids who are breathing, like in and in and in and in and in and in. And so play, it's interesting. Like I see Cecilia here knitting. Play is not a thing. Like it's like what I might consider play, you might not consider play. So, for example, Cecilia may find knitting incredibly engaging. Something about it might center her, it might feel quite satisfying to her to do. For others, knitting might be work. Someone might enjoy gardening or doing puzzles. For others, gardening is work or puzzles is not play. So play is very unique to your own psychology in terms of what it matches inside of you. So there's not one thing, let's say, that is play, but there are things that we can define as not play. When I think of that question, I often think what people are referring to is the word free play. And free play is what children fall into in one terms of what we call void moments. And I think one of the reasons right now we have so many anxious, aggressive, or shut down kids, like kids like whatever, don't care, doesn't matter, kind of like their bodies aren't filled with aliveness in their spirits, is that they've lost what we call free play. And free play, the reason we've lost it is because free play takes root in void moments, like those kind of like empty times of nothing, and devices got in the way of our void moments. So we have an entire, in fact, like this is actually the very first generation of kids ever since the dawn of time, since humans have existed, that does not have a play-based childhood. This has never happened ever since humans have been humans. So I guess to answer your question, then what is play? In free play, it's when a child is not being stimulated by a device, like an iPad or a cell phone or something like that. They're not being played with by their grown-up, and they are not unstructured activity like soccer, hockey, dance, et cetera. So, in that space, a child is meant to be in a void in which they discover themselves and fall into what we would in psychology call free play. So we lost our void moments. Void moments aren't like kind of sort of maybe like a little bit helpful when it comes to child development. They're absolutely crucial. So it's in this void where we don't have stimulation coming in that we're meant, like, let's just go with the pre-hormonal child, the child like before they hit their hormones. What's meant to happen is they're meant to feel a little tug that comes inside of themselves, a little voice that says, oh, like I want to go play Lego, or oh, I want to draw something, or I want to go compose something, or I'm gonna go read a book, or I'm gonna go knit, or I don't know, but they feel a tug that draws them into an activity. And that is where children like it's like it's interesting. It's where they find, they process their world. Like we think of play often as this weird thing that kids do on the edge of life that doesn't really matter, but it's absolutely crucial. Like if we, for example, it's where kids both practice courage, but also digest anxiety. So let's look at this, for example. If you do studies on play all around the world, and so there have been studies, and they obviously haven't studied every single culture, but vast studies which have studied tribal cultures, remote cultures, all sorts of cultures. There's one theme in children's books that rises to the very, very top. In every culture that's been studied, it rises to the top as is surfaces as the most common theme in the entire world. This to me tells us something about play. So the most common theme in the entire world in children's literature, so ages around four years old, all the way up to around 16, which is like if you think about it, like that's an absolutely massive gap to have the same theme interest. But it comes out as being orphaned. So they think about it, Harry Potter, Anna Green Gable, Secret Garden, Lion King, Batman, Superman, Oliver, Annie, Bambi, Lion King, Frozen. Like you could just go on and on. Like children's authors know this. You want a bestseller, you got to kill the parents. Like, but kind of how it works. But that tells us something about play. Because play isn't necessarily fun. Like lots of play is actually not fun at all. But it's engaging, not fun. But it's a processing place. And so this is why it's so dire that it's being taken away right now from children. So a child's greatest need, like human children, their greatest need is their people. Their great, their greatest need is attachment. So basically, they're processing at one step removed through a character. Like they didn't lose their parents, the character did. And not only do these characters survive, they thrive like Superman. They can fly around the world and take care of everybody, or Harry Potter, they become magicians. These are attachment, thriving stories. And that is one of the things that play does, is it a lot, it's a place where children are processing their greatest fears or practicing courage, for example. Like, like for me, I'm the youngest of nine kids. I would have come home from school, been given a snack, and sent outside to play. If I'd said to my mom, I don't feel like it, she'd be like, Yeah, Hannah, this is actually not a democracy. Like, no one's really asking you, like, out you go. She wasn't reading books on the psychology of play at that time. She was just doing what pretty much every family did at the time, which they had an intuitive understanding that children needed to have some outdoor time. We would have been riding bikes without our parents, climbing trees, doing all sorts of things, and our parents weren't behind us. We knew where they were should we need one, but they weren't with us. We would have been practicing courage every single day. The cortisol would have been rising in our systems, which would have calibrated our alarm system, ready for a wounding world every single day. Now we've got kids in their 20s at the grocery store calling home to the Dr. Woodchide cheese to buy or milk to buy. They can't make decisions. They don't know how to, their body systems aren't used to the cortisol that rises and then being able to figure it out on their own. Play was all of that for children. And now we replaced it with structured activities and entertainment. And I'm just to be clear, I have nothing wrong with entertainment or structured activities. They're just not the same thing.

Jesper Conrad: 07:27
Yeah. So a lot to dive into. I was sent back down memory lane, among other things. Playing in the woods with my brother, breaking my foot and all the other fun things we did when we explored sitting in trees, plucking pears and apples. And then also looking at our children today. We are in a situation as we are full-time travelers who unschool our kids that they luckily have enough time that even though there is entertainment in our lives, then they also seem to have these void moments you talk about. And it is different for each and every one of them. For one of them, it's piano, and it's just wonderful to see when he he finds that. How to inspire people to do them? Because at the same time, the fear level seems to have risen over the last many, many years. We talked with Peter Gray, who have written Free to Learn and is very interesting in this subject, also. And he told about how kids are driven out to the school bus so they do not have any even to walk from the home to the school bus as individuals or alone or time without adult supervision.

Hannah Beach: 09:17
Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 09:18
So I'm like, how do we get yeah? I think I'm just giving up.

Cecilie Conrad: 09:25
Can we just talk geography for a bit? Because American children are driven to the school bus. Yeah. You're from a culture where children are still trusted to do their own thing, and they have a lot of system. What's that in English? They do their own thing. You can see a nine-year-old on the train alone. You see kids walking to school by themselves or riding their bikes to school by themselves. They walk to the supermarket and with grocery lists or whatever with their own project. I'm making a cake today, I'm going to buy the things I need. So it's not the same everywhere.

Jesper Conrad: 10:04
No.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:05
And it's not the same everywhere. It's probably not even the same everywhere in the US. You probably have to do that. I would agree.

Hannah Beach: 10:12
I would agree with that. Like I live in a pretty working class town, and there's a lot of children I still see in kindergarten walking to school where I am, but depends on what neighborhood you're in or where you're living. So I do see that. But I also see as I speak in Europe and things as well, that this is slowly moving that way as well. And that the children, for example, who used to, if you think about it, when we children used to walk home from school, you often would see child just walking and perhaps sort of talking to themselves quietly or holding a stick and kind of doing this or kicking a rock on their way home. We often see children now holding a phone. And this is happening around the world at younger and younger ages. That the empty times are being replaced with devices. And we used we're seeing this. Yes, I would agree that it's definitely more in North America, but we're seeing this shifting. I'm seeing this conversation happening everywhere that has phones, has cell phones being introduced to children at younger and younger ages. That we're overprotecting kids in the physical world and sort of under-protecting kids on the online world. We have the whole thing reversed. But that those void moments are being taken away. They're being eroded slowly as people adopt a phone-based childhood. But then, Jesper, you asked me a question about, but I do agree with you, Cecilia, that it it is place specific and culture specific as well. But I see a movement that way, but I also see a cluster movement the opposite way right now. Whereas people are sort of saying, okay, I can't change the culture at large, but I could change my family or my cul-de-sac or my school. And I'm seeing a massive movement right now towards families saying, can we do this together? Because right now, if I send my child outside, there's nobody else outside. How about we all put the devices away or we all delay giving our kids phones until 14 or 16? Like this is a huge movement right now where I am. And I just finished writing an article from McLean's magazine in Canada about that, this movement of families coming together to say, how can we counteract this culture in our own small ways? And I I think that you touched on something, Jesper. It's it's there's a moderation here. I think, first of all, if we don't understand the importance of it, we're not gonna make change because change is uncomfortable. So we're not gonna try and be counterculture or do our own thing if we don't understand why play is important. If you think it's just this thing that doesn't matter, you're not gonna, you're not gonna do it. But if I'll if I think right now people are going, oh my goodness, I had no idea what it was doing for my child's health, mental health, emotional health. Once you understand that, you may be more apt to go, okay, twice a week, we can plan nothing. Maybe on Sundays we won't have devices, or maybe we will delay this, or maybe we will have a couple times a week where they're not in an activity. But if you didn't understand the importance of it, why would you carve out any time for it?

Cecilie Conrad: 13:05
Maybe also use so I'm unusually quiet right now because I hear your wisdom, and at the same time, I tend to disagree a little bit with calling it out on the device. I think I know that it's very luring, but I also know that it's there and it's going to be part of our lives, and we are the human beings with the phone in the pocket, not the other way around. So we're gonna have to learn to manage this, and so are our children. I don't believe in a smartphone-free childhood, I think it's better. Have made that choice. Have I or have we? We have no no no we have that if they want it, they can have it, and then that our job is to teach them or help them, guide them, walk with them on the path of figuring out how to use this thing. Lots of adults make the same mistake of having this thing in their hand all the time, and what we can do is to create a culture where we thrive. And I also see that the smartphone to just might as well be an iPad or a computer but whatever now says, Yeah, whatever. Yeah, it's a tool and it can be used in many different ways. It's a very bad habit to walk down the street with your smartphone in your hand, and I have to not do that, and my husband has to not do that, and so my children will start not doing that. In our family, we can be very judgmental. I think a lot of people can be very judgmental when they do people watching, and one of the things we judge is oh, that looks like a nice walk that friend group is doing with half of them with their headphones on and all of them looking at their they're walking together, okay, but no one's paying attention. So, and I mean it's just pointing it out a little bit, I think makes the change, at least for our family. So that's one thing, rather than I just think that there is in the talk about childhood and the talks for parents about how do we handle this new situation, there's so much shame and there's so much fear, and I think it's at least in my world, it makes more sense to learn how to navigate it in a smart way and make some smart choices about how do I want to use it. And I've learned a lot from my children showing me that hey, the phone can be play. Look, I'm playing, drawing weird stuff on the iPad, or I'm using a game that's meant to do one thing to do a different thing inside a third thing to create a Wikipedia page about whatever the color wheel. How's that not play? It's like me with my watercolor when I was a kid, just the different tools. Yeah, that would be different. So there's a lot of fun, and there's also a lot of actually void to experience on the device. Suddenly you realize you're bored because it's really boring to watch Netflix all the time. I don't want to be part of installing all of that fear. I a hundred percent agree that childhood is heavily misunderstood by the modern culture. And I think the combination of structured activity, fear, and ambition is really toxic and ruining it for everyone, children and parents alike.

Hannah Beach: 16:49
Yeah, and I don't I don't think there is any room for shame in any forms of whatever people can judge each other for unschooling or schooling or not private school or public school or like this debate or that way and there. There's no room for, I mean, there's there's so many ways to live in the world in beautiful ways, and and I think it's always about curiosity. I think though, that it would have to be said that say that it sounds like you're raising your children where they're not using their devices as attachment, that they're very close to you and that you're a family that has created a that you're perhaps not the average family, let's just say, if that makes sense. And I think that if you look at the research, so for example, how your children are using their phones, it would be considered play. So when children have devices, for example, like Minecraft, where you're creating things, that would fall into the category of play. But that's not how the average child uses them. The average child uses them as attachment soothers or for the dopamine. And so the dopamine that comes through their bodies when they're when they so you don't get dopamine when you use a device. It does, it does, if it doesn't give you a point or a level, those sorts of things, you don't actually get the dopamine in your body. So you're actually engaging for for the satisfaction of the engagement. So it would still fall into the category of play. That isn't, however, how children on average are using devices. So your children, and like my children, may be the exception, but I want to look at children as culture as a whole. In the states, 20% of two-year-olds have their own cell phone plans. Children aren't small adults. Their brains are developing, they require relationship with us. They require, it's like it's to me to say, well, they're gonna have to get used to it anyways, then that might, we might as well not breastfeed babies or we might as well not do anything. We have to accept that there's certain stages of life that children need different things. We don't go, well, they're gonna have to use this, they're gonna have to sleep alone one day, so we might as well get used to it from day one. Well, no, when they're ready for this, then we'll get them there. There is a time and place for phones, but I don't think they're meant for two-year-olds. You see what I'm saying?

Cecilie Conrad: 18:59
So that is looking at I didn't know we were talking about two-year-olds.

Hannah Beach: 19:03
No, so just because children are going to have them one day doesn't mean to me that we don't, if you don't know what it feels, if we don't give them what normal feels like in their body system without dopamine, you don't know when your body system's off because you don't know yourself. If you're being flooded with the world before you have a self, how do you come to know yourself? And so one of the things that I think smartphones got in the way with is the development of identity because we're giving them to children so young that before they know they want to play piano or before they feel the call, like, oh, I want to draw this thing on the computer, or the feel the call, they're using them as soothers, which is sort of distracting them from their relationships or themselves. So, yes, I'm not trying to scare people into not, and we do have a culture where this is part of our life, just like lots of things are part of our lives. But I also think the child. Adulthood is different than adulthood, and our brains are being wired, and the relationships that we require, and the void moments that we require to come to know who we are need to also be protected. So I think there's a balance there.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:16
Well, obviously. There's all it's always it's always a question of balance. It can also be too much play-doh or too much forest walking, even. In my opinion, the worst part is that there's not enough mind put into how do we want to organize the childhood of our children. It's more like putting out fires and running after trends and and looking at the neighbor, and I don't know, fixing fixing problems that we might that might not even be problems. And I I think uh what I was just trying to, and I don't want this to this is not we're not in opposition, even. Yeah, no, I don't feel that. I just don't want to put anything on that fire of let's ban the smartphone and let's be afraid of computer games, and let's, you know, kids can't have iPads and all. I talk to a lot of parents who feel a lot of guilt whenever their children are watching a movie or playing a tablet game or or playing Fortnite or Minecraft or whichever game that is their favorite game. So there's all this guilt and fear, and I've been working with it myself. And I just think it's not about that, it's about how we design childhood and how we we use the things we use. You can also have the same analysis around health, let's say, it can also be too healthy. The smoothie in the morning can simply be too brown and too yucky, and you know, in a way, you know, it has to stop somewhere. So it's these balances and putting enough thought into how do we want this to be and what values are we basing our life on.

Hannah Beach: 21:58
And no, I I agree. We can get obsessed with like this culture perfection. My son loves Fortnite. Like I hear him playing Fortnite, he's killing himself laughing. And that's why I really think that it's I have two kids. My kids are 33 and 31 and 17. So I have a 14-year gap between number two and number three. So my up kid and grade who is 17 at home. But it's it's I just think there's I think that there we are need to be aware of the moderation or the fact that some of those void moments do matter. And that I actually and that that it matters. And I think that we are called, yeah, that's that there that we do need some moderation.

Cecilie Conrad: 22:37
I think you're completely right. And I also think that we can also flip it and use the device as a way to create the attachment. I think this all this fear, and that's why I'm reacting to it, all this fear and all these restrictions, and you know, very often children have screen time timers on their devices and all these things. It's just creating more distance between the parents and the children. So you're taking away the thing that the kids love because you think it's ruining their life, but in doing so, it's often ruining the relation. And I think it might be a better idea to sit down and play some Fortnite with them and get on board and do some things together. It's not about the smartphone or the computer itself, it's about how you design your relationships and your life and how you design the everyday life. Is it balanced or is it not?

Hannah Beach: 23:40
Absolutely. And I think if you could if you can engage your children with whatever they're interested in, it's always it's always a good idea. I think that what I see is a lot of families who've lost their children, who their children are their rooms 24-7, and they've literally like the families that come to me have lost their children. And so there's very it's very hard to get in because the dopamine that comes from the device is they're addicted, basically, their children. And so it becomes a it is very, very hard. But it's it's a very complicated, very complicated issue.

Jesper Conrad: 24:09
Indeed, it is, but just to go back to you used the word worried about it, which I think is interesting because it gives room for a dialogue where we don't need to define what is play, is display, display, display. It's about can we calm out some time that is non-controlled, if I get your understanding of void time uh correctly. So why is it it works to have the uncontrolled time? What is it that the research shows that happens when you just fobble? I don't know the words for it, if you wander around, do stuff, kick to a stick and a stone and all that.

Hannah Beach: 24:57
Well, I guess there's a couple things. One, I think, is the formation of identity, but the also is in terms of brainwiring for frustration and aggression. So I guess there's two things, but I guess I'll back it up here. Okay, let me think of it this way. So I spent a good portion of my life, like a the vast majority of my life, working with really vulnerable girls. So a lot of the time I worked with teenage girls who'd come out of sex work, drug addiction, really challenging lives. So these girls were coming with a lot of trauma. And I, my, I developed play-based programs where kids would come and I'd work with these kids and they'd be referred to me. Now, a lot of these girls that I would work with, and this is kind of a backwards way of going here. So just bear with me for a moment. But a lot of these girls that I would work with, there's their schools that they went to would be teaching them all about sexual consent. Okay. Now obviously I agree with teaching kids sexual consent. Obviously, like that's a no a non, like there's no discussion there. Clearly, that's a good thing. But it was absolutely irrelevant for the girls that I taught that I worked with. They would have said yes to anybody. So were they giving consent? Technically, yes. But they didn't even have a self. They didn't even know what they were giving. They didn't, they would have said yes no matter what you asked, any sexual favor, any guy, any age, anything, they would have said yes. So the it's like society was trying to teach them how to be healthy. You couldn't teach them because they didn't have a self yet. The self is grown in childhood through the process of feeling something inside of you and hearing something, going, ah, that's what I think, or that's what I feel, or oh, I want to go play that video game and I like it, or oh, that was kind of boring. I didn't like that. Or I this or I that. The problem is when kids haven't had, if they've been distracted from themselves from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed, they don't hear the little thing inside of them. They don't know, like they laugh at jokes that they don't really even get, or they pretend to like music they don't even like, or they dress like everybody else. Like it's like they don't even know who they are, so they can't bring themselves into the world. Play was meant to be a place where you started to hear that voice, or in the void moments where you'd start to hear something speak to you, and you start to develop a relationship with this person being you. And the a lot of the kids I worked with had never well, they never had play, or they had just they were on, they were just always on devices all the time. So they even going to bed, they wouldn't have laid in bed for even 10 minutes thinking, or you know, wondering about something, feeling sad or feeling happy or feeling anything. And so there wasn't a relationship with themselves. And so it's kind of a complicated thing, but void moments just allow us some time and space, maybe to get to know ourselves a little bit, if that makes sense. To kind of find out what we like or we don't like or what what bores us, what excites us, what we yeah. And so even if it's just sitting in a car for a moment, or like we were talking about Cecilia, walking home from school or or or walking home, walking to the grocery store where you're thinking, a lot of people have lost this place where they actually have time to think or feel. Yeah. A lot of void moments also used to happen for kids and chores, and we see kids have less chores. And when your body's anchored, your brain would often free float. Like if you're doing something like knitting or washing dishes or chopping what something that's routine that you don't have to think about because your body knows how to do it automatically. The when the body's anchored, the brain can free float. We also see a lot of kids actually have a let a lot less chores as well, at least the kids that I was working with. So there was no times where their brain could free float, because those often are also like void moments for the brain as well. So a lot of kids just lost the places where they get to know who they are, really. Does that does that sense?

Jesper Conrad: 29:11
It makes sense when I look at my own life, then I can see how often I choose to distract myself instead of just be, even though I try to be very aware. Sometimes I just distract myself with all your work at something else. It is, but also it's also really wonderful to run without listening to anything, just have time for the force to process.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:37
Music can work out. Go ahead, Cecilia. I was just thinking about what do you think about the importance of or the way it can unfold to anchor those feelings with someone? Let me unfold that a little bit. So the feeling I like this and I don't like that, and I want to do this and I don't really enjoy doing that. That feeling, who am I in that process? It's a process of self. There's also some sort of process of figuring out what life is in the same process. You know, you go to bed at night frustrated because some element of life is not balanced, and I think that process of figuring that out is also part of maybe a later stage of childhood, but still. And I was just thinking, I remember that process from my own childhood. I was not in the forest like everyone else in this conversation, apparently. I was but obviously there was no smartphone. I did other things, but I remember being lonely. I remember that I had these things, but to anchor them, I think you need someone who sees you. I did have siblings and friends here and there, but it would have been really nice to have been seen with these things, and I can see what really took hold were the things that were seen. So there might have been little sprouts of other things, but as I had no one to unfold it with and unpack it with and just discuss it with. It just sort of died out. And that's another problem I think that the parents are distracted too.

Hannah Beach: 31:35
100%. You spoke to something really, really beautiful and important there is that I think we have a very, very attachment-hungry children right now. We have relationally starved children who many of their grown-ups are distracted 24-7. Or we're we're in a distracted culture. And I mean, this seeing this where our humans well, first of all, it's beautiful. The fact that you felt this, though, even though it's not a good feeling to feel lonely. We all have emotion, but we don't all feelings and emotion are different. Everybody has emotion, they're involuntary responses that come into their bodies, and feelings are the conscious feedback that says, oh, this is what was going on in my body. And a distracted culture of not everybody has feelings, they're only having emotion because you don't actually have the feedback. So you were able to at least feel all the things, even if they weren't good feeling, feelings that felt lovely inside your body. But to have a grown-up who's able to, you know, to mirror that and to be able to hold that. We have, we, we don't, we, we're so busy. We I think about that in terms of I think about that. So I'm a young, I have a very unusual family. So my parents were Benedictine monks. They had 11 foster brothers and children, and nine, nine by nine, they gave birth to nine children and then a fostered 11. So if you people thought I lived in a group home, but it's just it was just my house. Like I just grew up in a very unusual way. But I felt attuned to by my mother. And it wasn't, I mean, there's no way she could have like now people are like have one or two children. It wasn't the type of attuning where you had to spend every moment. It was that she held space for the family in a way that I just felt her the solidity of her presence. I don't know if that makes sense. I just knew she'd be in the kitchen. I just knew if I I knew the rhythm of the household. I knew that if I needed to go find her, I could. And I feel right now that we our culture, because of whether it's we're so busy economically, the pressure of, as you mentioned, Cecilia, to parent in this perfect way, it's like parenting has become about the children, not just about holding space for the family. And so it's no longer now it's like this thing you do with the child as opposed to going, well, you also have to cook and you also want to take care, spend time with your partner, and you want to for yourself, like it's no longer about creating a rhythm and a household of seasons and life. It's about this direct parenting thing. I'm gonna make this child's life perfect, which is not how humans grow, if that makes sense.

Cecilie Conrad: 34:06
Yeah, and make the life perfect now that I realize that something is wrong by taking something away that the child really likes. That was why I reacted in the beginning of the conversation. Oh, wait a minute, it's not good for children to spend so much time on their screens. Why don't I shut off the internet every day at five o'clock in the afternoon, except for on my own phone or whatever? You know, yeah, that would be ridiculous. Yeah, right. You know, you could probably work offline if you really had to after five o'clock in the afternoon.

Hannah Beach: 34:38
It's just but I also think and I'm gonna just say here is that I also think like when you look at an attachment-based approach, an attachment-based approach looks at what does a child need, not necessarily what do they want. And so there's times, if my child wanted to only eat chocolate all day, I would not think that that was good for my child. And I would say, no, that's isn't good for your body. You're gonna be sick, like if I had a young child. And so there's times and places where I, as a grown-up, with my adult wisdom, not gonna let my child do certain things because I know what's I have the wisdom to know that you might think that you want that, but actually you're gonna be ill. And so I'm okay with my child being sad sometimes if I make choices for them that I they would not understand in that moment, if that makes sense. It does. From an attachment-based approach, anyways, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 35:33
Yeah, I have uh an episode I referred to in a lot of the episodes we do. It's with a young guy called Jack Stewart who turned off the internet in his own life because it had been too much, and now he's only online something like three hours a week or every single we that is radical, but the interesting thing he experienced was that he saw that the internet, the videos, the chatting, whatever it was, was a social appetite suppressant for him. He felt lonely. He actually, as he told us, he went to the neighbors and knocked on their door and said, Hey, do you want to play? Because he didn't have that feeling of being together, met by others, which one of the big changes I have made in my life is that I went from a full-time go-to day job to a full-time traveling lifestyle, which meant that I didn't any longer have that kind of colleagues, instead, I had a family. I was with my family all the time, and oh my god, that felt really, really good. But when I look back at it with the lens of Jack's idea of the social appetite suppressant, I can see how going to work is a social or real attachment suppressant somehow. Where earlier, and I'm not saying everything was better in the olden days, but if you look at the cultures, then you often work with people you actually were attached to. It was family. Where today I went to work and talked with 30 strangers somehow. I never saw any of them privately. This episode with him, I'm starting to consider what is that doing to our way of being families when when it's covered, I didn't feel the need to call my brother or sister because I was socially fit by going to work, even though it was a substitute somehow.

Hannah Beach: 37:48
Yeah, that's an interesting thing that you bring up that I hadn't really thought about yet, but that's it's true. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, and just thinking about what you said there, it's interesting. And I'm also going back in my mind to what Cecilia said, and now my brain's all abuzz in a good way. One of the things that Cecilia said a moment ago, too, which is now kind of bringing that up as well, is that I think that we often hold what children love the most, we hold against them as a threat. Like we dangle it like a little thing. Like we use devices, like if you don't do your homework, you'll or if you do something bad, you'll have your phone taken away, or or even sending them to the room if what they're most attached to is you. It's like, okay, well, if you're not your best self, now you can't be around me. Whatever the child holds dear, we will use as the leveraged, whether that's the phone or the relationship with us or whatever it is. But it comes down to yeah, the this threat that we use. Um, whatever a child, this is very common in Western culture, though, to hold whatever a child holds dear to them. I mean, it's like the idea of timeouts or sending a child to their room or whatever it is, whatever they hold as special to them. We're like, well, if you're not perfect, basically I'm taking that away from you.

Cecilie Conrad: 38:58
It keeps executing power, which is not going to help with the relation, it's not going to be a powerful and loving attachment with trust and where you can unfold what I was talking about before is exactly each other.

Hannah Beach: 39:15
But if you don't have attachment, if you don't have it, so this is what I'd say the average families I work with don't have it. So they don't, they're like, Well, what do we do then? If you don't, if your children aren't driven to follow you as a compass, to and there's no closeness there that drives that force between you, then they only have leverage. So they're like, what else do we do? If we don't have attachment, we have to use consequences, bribes, punishments. So there's because like you gotta, there's one or the other. Like, if you don't have attachment, how do you get the children to follow to be close? Do you see, do you see what I'm saying? And so what's happening is this a lot of people have lost the attachment because of the children already, let's say, attached onto their devices, or as you're saying, socially, this is why these conversations are Intermingling now and with J with what Jesper just brought up in terms of let's say the social, the other things, let's say they're peer attached or they're attached to work or attached to whatever. It's like all of a sudden, how do I then draw those child, my child back into a sense of closeness? How do I? And it's never going to be with threats or punishment or any of those things. But it's like we've lost our way. We don't know how, like I feel for these families. They're really at a loss.

Hannah Beach: 40:26
Yeah.

Hannah Beach: 40:27
You have like an hour a day with them at the end of the day, they get home at six o'clock. They then there's homework. Like it's our whole culture is set up to be, it's just ridiculous.

Jesper Conrad: 40:36
Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 40:37
But it's what I said before about running around putting out fires and not taking the time. And I totally get why it's happening. I'm actually, I said also before that we could be very judgmental, and I'm not around this topic. I get why it happens. It's just if you can't spend some time and stop as a as an adult old enough to have children and think about what matters. And think about how those things that matters can take sensor stage in life, get enough of your attention. Well, then we have a real problem. Everyone's heard the stones in the jar and you know, you put in the big stones first, and then the smaller ones, you shake it, and at the end you can still add a glass of red wine, my mom would always say. But whatever the values are the big stones. And if we're just I mean, I'm saying this because you said homework, and actually, homework does not matter at all. If you don't have a situation with your child, if you're not thriving, if there is fear, if you need to take tablets to sleep, if you're you know afraid of whatever your marriage or your finances, it really doesn't matter at all. And yet, families run around to make sure that the homework is done.

Hannah Beach: 42:10
I know the whole thing, it breaks my heart actually. Think about this the other day. I was talking to somebody who's getting married, and I'm like, we plan, we spend more time planning a wedding than we do our marriages. We spend more time like not thinking of like how are what type of family culture do we want to have? Like, how do we want to live as people together? How do we want to live in relationship with each other? And I think that I'm a single mom. I don't have some idea of what this has to look like, a certain type of family. Like I feel like I do this myself as a myself with how I want to raise my child. I'm very intentional. But I also feel very privileged to be able to have that space within myself and to be raised in a way that I'm wanting these conversations, if that makes sense. I feel like we need to slow down and be able to be intentional with what type of children, what's important. We're so afraid to be counter-culture. We're so afraid to this fear culture in terms of if you don't get into the right school or you don't do this or you don't do that, and you don't. I I just um we've really lost track, I suppose, of us as a humanist.

Cecilie Conrad: 43:24
We're afraid, but we're also highly distracted. We guess even if you stop to think about it, you forget that you're thinking about it, and then you do something else. It actually takes some mental effort to figure out what's important. It's not the same thing for everyone, or maybe it is the same thing for everyone. When I do these analyses with my clients, it's very often the same things, but it doesn't look the same. The execution is not the same. So we might all say health is important and our children are important and our friends are important, whatever. It's somewhat, and then maybe you have some passions you want to unfold and you want your finances and basic things to to to be healthy. And and and though those first five ones are very often the same in the headline, but how you want that to look and how to unfold it is very much not the same for everyone. And to stop and think about that for a while and then get to that point where it comes becomes actionable, where you can say, Okay, I'm putting that weekly walk in the calendar. We're going to take out five hours every week, and everyone's coming. We're driving to the mountain and we're walking 10 kilometers. We can bring the phones to take pictures, but we're talking, walking, drinking water, looking at the view. That's what we're doing. Then you have to do it. And it's a long journey to figure out for our family, this is what would work. And to actually put it in the calendar, get everyone on board. Oh, I know sitting at five o'clock in the car, all these things. Yeah. It's not done in a high.

Hannah Beach: 45:07
I agree with you, Cecil. And I think the thing is for me, and every family is different, I have to embed a structure for that. Because if I'm exhausted, I'll give you an example, like the family dinner, for example. There are certain cultural practices that used to be embedded throughout history. Eating together was one of them because eating's not just about getting calories. We know when humans co-eat and have eye contact, that's sort of a bit of attachment glue happens. That's why usually when you go on a first date, most people go for a drink or a meal because our dating rituals follow the science of attachment. We never used to have to think about eating together. It was something people did no matter what. Like it was sorry, that's loud. If we can hear a big loud fog horn right now. Okay. A fairy is going by. I live right on the water. So, but now it's like you have to think about it. So just in North America, just under 9% of families eat together on a regular basis. I'm not judging this. I'm just saying this is the way it is. But if you think about that, there used to be an anchor that you did, sort of like having a shower brushing your teeth. You just do it because everybody else does it. It's just a norm in our culture. There used to be an anchor where people gather daily every day. We don't have this anymore. Now you have to think about it. Do I feel like eating together? Do I not feel like eating together? Like it's just not an anchor that holds people close. And so we might have to do, as you say, develop a, you know, okay, once a week we're going for a walk together as a couple or a family or myself on my own, whatever. But if I don't embed it as a practice, when I'm too tired, I'm not gonna do it. If I'm if I don't, if I don't have it as kind of like the family dinner, if I don't make it part of my ritual, I'm not gonna do it. If I don't feel like it, I'll do it when I when I feel like it. I won't, and then it doesn't, it's sort of like it's like a chicken and the egg problem. It's like I don't feel like it, so I'm not gonna do it, but I'm distracted all the time, so I'm not gonna feel like it. It's like yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:00
It's and but it is about establishing a culture, and that can be done. Yes, it can be done to make a decision, and of course, we have to be patient. If we have never had the culture of having family dinners, and we decide, well, that is going to be our glue. We're eating every day anyway, everyone. So why don't we make this change? We sit or once a week, or whatever works for your family. If that is what you decide to do, it's not done in one day, it's not done by saying now we do that. I don't know, three, four months of doing it every day before it becomes a habit, before it becomes really nice, before you know, you know, the way of oh my god, the dinner table. We could talk about that for about three hours, the whole culture of dinner tables, but it's a really big deal. We're traveling the world, we're living with a lot of different people, meeting people from all kinds of cultures, co-living alone, co-living with other families, moving in and out of different social circles. And we happen to be a family dinner family. We sit down, have a meal together at least once a day. It's just been such a journey to see how that's done and not done in bad ways, and surprisingly overwhelming for us because this is such a big deal, big part, like not even a big deal. It's such a like brushing your teeth. Of course, you do that. Yeah, it is normal for you. You come home, you close the the door behind you, whatever things you don't even think about. Of course, you do that.

Jesper Conrad: 48:38
It was a revelation Cecilia brought forth when we went from our oldest daughter. We have four kids, two boys, two girls. Our oldest daughter went to an alternative school, and we had the two middle ones in a Waldorf kind of institution, Steiner in Europe. And then we started home educating or having them at home after Cecilia had cancer and survived. Long story short, she's still here. Yes. But one of the changes, I can see her. Yes. I'm not imagining. What's the question? It's not a question, it's a story about one of the things you pointed out that changed in our life was that as the kids were home all the time with her, the need for the dinner as an attachment, reconnection became less important. But for me, who was at work going to work, the dinner was still very important. So there was it was fun to see how it had less of an importance because it was there. And now, as they have grown up, then they we have re reintroduced it as a more important period.

Cecilie Conrad: 49:47
What I said back then was just that because we don't go in each hour separate direction every morning, there's no attachment wound to be healed in the afternoon. Yeah, and therefore we don't necessarily have to sit around the dinner table all of us every day. And what I also said back then, just reminding you, yes, please. Because it feels like I mean we've always had the sit-down dinners, yeah. But what I said was it's not important that this is the moment the children are eating.

Jesper Conrad: 50:19
That was it, yeah. Yes, it was just sitting too.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:22
They were small and it didn't matter if they'd had a huge sandwich before or they had some snacks in the sofa after whatever it was about spending some time. And sometimes in the long Scandinavian summer nights, maybe we didn't go home. We spent all night in the park instead, had a pizza, whatever. So it's in our so I think the Scandinavian culture is really holding the fort of trying to be still with the good childhood. And one big deal in our culture really is the family dinner. You sit down, have dinner at six o'clock is the right time to do it for everyone, apparently. Very important.

Hannah Beach: 51:01
And I I love that you brought in that context. I mean, and I also have the same with Tamara who I wrote my book, where she homeschooled her children, and I homeschooled. Well, my youngest went to a Waldorf school one day a week, but it was like a farm one, and then there goes home with the other days. But it's like we the necessity for those gatherings wasn't the same at those times because we were together all day and we slept together and it was just whatever. But as my children age, there's times and places, but I have to sometimes have to remember that the larger culture is not really like that for most people that I work with. The larger culture, people are gone all day and very free-floating from each other all the time. And then I'm like, okay, let's count those points of connection. That's where culture matters when a culture has norms that gathers people for not just the for the average person, if that makes sense, who's living in that way, because the children then get lost in the mix and the closeness of we all float away from each other, basically.

Jesper Conrad: 52:00
Hannah, I have a thought and then a question. I think that a lot of people don't put in these void moments anymore, or they have been eaten up by entertainment, which may a lot of us less good at playing, maybe. And then I had the thought about alcohol as a social clue that it maybe helps people get this. Oh, now we do not need to do anything, now we can just relax and have fun. So my thought is as we are becoming less play-oriented as people, are we then drinking more? It might be a foul idea, but uh, but I was just thinking if addiction and drugs and uh alcoholics. I don't know the answer.

Hannah Beach: 52:48
I I I would be lying if I could tell you I know any research on that. I have no idea if we're drinking more than we were before the smartphone was invented. I honestly have no idea. But it's an interesting link that you put there. Perhaps, perhaps it allows, I mean, you know, liquid courage allows us to free our bodies a bit more. Perhaps perhaps we do sometimes need more to let loose because our bodies are so wound up tightly. But I honestly don't know for sure the answer to that.

Jesper Conrad: 53:15
No, it was also just a fun network in my head. Yeah. Then then we'll go to my question. So for people listening to this, thinking, oh yes, let me try to create some free playtime void moments for my kids. I will send them outside the dome. Part of me is just thinking, oh my god, that would fail. How do you set yourself up not failing? Or it's just like go out, play. And the kids would just be like, but we have never grown up in that culture. So what are we doing? Yeah. So my question maybe is then with the work you do and your interest in this, when you are guiding people, how to start?

Hannah Beach: 53:55
Yeah. So I mean, I'd say start small. One of the things that Celia said, you don't go from zero to a hundred in even just recognizing something is important. You may lean gradually more into that. I'd say start small, whether it's just having one morning a week, let's say Sunday mornings, where you just have no devices and you sort of allow the family to unfold in the way because most families that I work with are on devices all day, every day from morning till night. So it's going to feel weird at first, and except that it's going to feel a little uncomfortable at first. But I would also say the grown-ups have to do the same thing as the children in that experience. So everyone kind of would put it away at that time. That when the child says to you, maybe I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored, it's really important in that moment, if you have a young child, like I'm talking about young children here who like, who haven't ever played before. I work with a lot of children right now in schools who've never played in their life other than on a device. So how are they gonna even know what to do? Like when you say you can go play, they're like, what does that even mean? What am I supposed to do? So often I want to say, oh, your brain is just beautiful. It's gonna come up with an idea. If you just listen really carefully, your body's gonna come up with an idea. And when it does, you can go do something. And in the meantime, it's just fine to just roll around the floor for a little bit or like do whatever. And we do it in small little bits, just small little moments. And in terms of the outside thing, this is where I see families coming together right now in a in a really beautiful way. Because they're just saying we we we can't send our child outside to play. There's no, unlike Scandinavia, which this is still very vibrant in the culture where children outside play, where that isn't happening as much here. Families are doing it now together in big ways. So they'll get together with the people on their street and they'll have a meeting and say, we'd like our children to be able to go outside, but there's nobody else out there with them. What if we all uh did this together? And so that your child's not the only one sort of in that experience by themselves. Um so I say start small, smart, start in little ways, don't have some grandiose sort of you know, plan for and do it gently, a little bit and for yourself as well.

Cecilie Conrad: 56:12
Yeah, I think that's a big deal. Yeah, to face how much it's the same for the adults.

Hannah Beach: 56:20
And recognize that play is not always fun. So, and that's where we see the link. I know we don't have any more time to talk, but that's where we see the link in lowering aggression and children who've had play, and that's why we're seeing in Canada, anyways, a massive movement to change our playgrounds at schools to what we call loose parts, where there's things you can drag and move and like logs and things. But play like could be knitting, play may be doing something frustrating that's hard to build and it's frustrating. Like, we don't, our kids don't it play looks like many things. And so just allowing that vast experience of play, not this uniform idea of like kids like necessarily running around, like it looks like many things, and every child's unique. So, what one child might find play is very different than another child.

Jesper Conrad: 57:05
Perfect. I think this is a good place to round off the episode. Hannah, for people who want to go more into your work and what you do, and if they want to contact you to work together with you, where do they find you? And if you also can mention your book and the other things you have done.

Hannah Beach: 57:23
Sure. They can find me at hanabeach.ca, which is h-a-n-n-a-h, be a c h.ca, so hanna beach.ca. And yeah, I I co-wrote the book with Tamara, Dr. Gordon Newfeld's daughter, Reclaiming Our Students, looking at how our schools can change. And it also has sections in there for homeschoolers and unschoolers as well, and parents, how we can change education to be more human and play, have more space for expression and individuality and growth and authenticity. I'm writing a book right now for parents, and I have a children's book coming out January 23rd. So my children's book is called Sometimes I Feel That Way Too. It's a little boy who's five-ish, and it's about yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 58:04
You've killed off the parents.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:06
I was going to ask the question is he an orphan?

Hannah Beach: 58:09
He's not an orphan. So it won't be a bestseller.

Jesper Conrad: 58:14
You can still edit it. Just kill them all.

Hannah Beach: 58:17
Oh, it's just a little children's book. It's a picture book. It's not a long book. But yes, orphan books, my goodness. Yes. But yeah, I'm diving deep into the world of play and family. And I'm writing a book right now on what children, yeah, looking at what sort of what kids need. I'm writing it with my son, actually, my eldest son, who lives the one that lives in Slovakia. He lives in Bratislava.

Jesper Conrad: 58:37
That sounds wonderful. Thanks a lot for your time. It has been a really interesting conversation.

Hannah Beach: 58:43
Me too. Thank you. You both got me thinking about things I'm gonna enjoy processing across right now while I'm going to go do the dishes. I'm gonna think I've got lots to think about today. Thank you for giving me that gift.

Cecilie Conrad: 58:53
Yeah, it was fun and likewise.