Playful Obstruction

Hi Friends!
So, I had a question about playful obstruction and I wanted to make a little comment about it.  I was reading in this article by Stanley Greenspan (it's called "Strengthening Reflective Thinking, but he veers off on another topic first): http://www.icdl.com/distance/webRadio/documents/RadioShow2006020906L.pdf.  Anyway, I was thinking about playful obstruction and really liked the way he explained it.  Here's what he says:

"Let’s say we are using a relationship exercise where we are playing a particular game to teach the child to seek our help. So, we are deliberately putting a toy up on a shelf and then playing dumb like showing the child where it is, but how are we going to get there. So the child has to go, grab us, take us, move us to the shelf area. Here we are setting up a situation where the child is motivated to relate to us. This is a very good semi‐structured, problem solving exercise where we are not strictly following the child’s lead, we are creating a circumstance where the child needs our assistance. But, here too, while we are doing that, we will find an object that the child really wants, we won’t just take some arbitrary object that is pre‐designed. We’ll say what is the child really interested in? Is it a cookie? Is it a particular toy? And when we put it out of sight, we’ll make sure we have his attention so he sees us putting it up a little bit out of sight, but he can see a little bit of it. Then we’ll be flirting with him as we put it up there – we’re engaging. Then, as he starts making some gestures or sounds indicating that he wants it, we’ll help him along and point to it and say, “is that what you want?” or point to something else so he’ll hopefully look at the thing he wants or take our hand and move it in that direction or give us some other gesture. Then we may act deliberately confused to get more circles of communication; to get more back‐and‐forth’s. We’ll see how many we can get without frustrating him to a degree where he loses interest until we get as many circles we can as part of the continuous flow, and then help him retrieve the object either by offering to pick him up or offering to get it for him and seeing if he can make a choice. So what we are getting here is we’re using a particular exercise in relationship‐building and actually, shared social problem‐solving, but we’re creating a semi‐structured situation. We’re orchestrating. In doing so, we’re getting into this continuous flow of back‐and‐forth interaction. But also, we’re tailoring to his nervous system. If he is a hyper‐responsive child, we’re being extra soothing. If his needs are hypo‐reactive, we’re energizing up and being very energetic. And similarly, if we are imitating sounds, we’ll again be tailoring to his nervous system – being more soothing or more energizing, using more visual support or slowing down our oral or our vocal cadence to meet his individual processing profile. We’ll be making the motor part of the task simple or complex. So for example, a child with motor planning problems who can’t sequence or plan easily in the latter example of working together to find an object, we’ll be making the physical action very simple. We won’t put it on a high shelf where the child has to bring a chair over and take three steps to get us to help him get the toy. We’ll put it on a low shelf where he just has to kind of look over in that direction and gesture a little bit and we can help him. Everything is orchestrated to the child’s existing developmental level and their processing profile and we create that learning profile accordingly."

What an amazing description!  Playful obstruction sounds like such a simple topic, but when you get to thinking about it, it takes a lot of thought, self-reflection and consideration for the individual child and circumstances.  We have to remember the child's profile, their motivation/interest, the basic emotional landscape... it's our job to make a simple obstruction become something enticing and exciting and important to that child.  So, how do you do that?  You start by considering your child's interests.  It is true that an interest is not always an object - it can be an idea or a thought as well.  We can add simple questions or facts in a way that encourage the child to think and problem solve differently than before.  Once you consider those interest, you add in an enticing problem or puzzle that allows the child to emotionally and cognitively crave involvement.  They LOVE the suspense and excitement of the idea because you are there supporting them through it.  By working through these situations with a child, they feel successful, excited and powerful in dealing with the world around them.

Anyway, thought it was a great thought and figured I'd share :)