CHM145: Playful Parenting Tips with Parenting Coach, Joy Wendling

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Christian Homeschool Mom's Podcast. I'm Dmitria, your host, and the goal of this show is to encourage Christian moms to homeschool with joy during this limited season of your life and to stay hopeful on your homeschool journey. And I'd like to help you apply practical homeschool tips that will help you in your everyday life as a mom of faith. I'm your host, a veteran homeschool mom of two beautiful daughters, one in college and one in high school. I'm a songwriter, a podcaster, and a child of the King, and I'm super happy to be your host. So thank you so much for listening in Today. I have a wonderful guest named Joy Wendling. She's enthusiastic, she's passionate, profound, and Joy is a writer, a speaker, a podcaster, and a certified parent coach and she's the founder of Created to Play. She has over twenty years of experience in children, youth and family ministry, as well as a master's in Youth, Family and Culture from Fuller Theological Seminary. Her idea of relaxing is gazing at mountains. From her Island home with an ice cold, diet coke and a good book. Joy lives in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys laughing and playing with her five daughters and her husband. You can get to know her better at her website, which is created to play dot com, and on her podcasts, which is called Playfully Faithful Parenting. We're going to find out more about Joy throughout this show today. We'll be talking about how we can disciple our children through a playful approach and so much more. So, I invite you to tune in to the next twenty five minutes to our joyful conversation. And if you're listening to this audio on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you like to tune into your shows, I invite you to also visit my YouTube channel so that you can actually see our interview. You there the lencas in the show notes and the name of that channel is mom Zest. So, without further ado, let's hop into this interview with Joy and we're gonna find out today what playful parenting is. So I'm really excited to have you Joy. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. I love the opportunity to meet with new mamas and talk about play. Yeah, let's do that. So but first, before we get started, please introduce yourself, your family, some of your favorite hobbies and pastimes, things you like to do that make you happy in life. So I am joy and I am a mom to five girls who are ten, six, six, four and two lots of littles still and all girls. So it is an estrogen filled house. My husband and girls and I we live on an island in the Pacific Northwest, about two hours northwest of Seattle, and so we just love taking little daily adventures, whether it's too a park, I'm going for walks, going to the zoo, um. And personally I love audiobooks and writing. Yes, I love audiobooks too, so convenient right, yes, And it sounds like you have a fabulous life with your children and you're you're living on an island. That sounds that sounds wonderful. It is not a tropical island, okay, but it is an island, but it's still an island. Yes, Yes, it's incredible. And then you get to do a lot of fun things with your kids. I love that. So okay, So you are a parent coach, right, yes, how does that? First of all, what inspired you to get into that? And what type of parenting coaching do you do? So? I do parent coaching with parents who want to be more playful or need help with discipline or discipling their kids and pointing them to Jesus. And so I found so Really it was an audiobook that got me here. I've read listen to this book called Discipline That Connects with Your Child's Heart by Jim and Lynn Jackson, and they are the founders of a ministry Connected Families. And I read that book and it totally changed my way of discipline with my kids. Because I had spent so many years in children's in youth ministry, almost twenty years, I felt really good about parenting my kids well in the happy, fun times, like the easy times, right, I was a great mom. I talked about Jesus and could do all that kind of stuff. But when discipline and stress and we had to get out of the door hit, I would walk away from those times feeling really guilty with the way I had treated my kids and knew that I was not modeling God's unconditional love for my kids in that moment and so I knew I needed to do something different from me so I could be the parent I wanted to be. And that's when I found this book and connected families, and then it changed my family so much that I wanted to help other families to learn from these resources, and so I was certified with them. And it's been just over a year now that I've been certified and working with clients. Wonderful and I love how you, from your personal experience, are able to pour into your work now to help parents because so many of us and I'm going to get into this little bit later, but so many of us are, you know, wondering like how how do we soften our approach to discipline while also discipling our children. And I group personally grew up in the seventies eight well in the eighties and nineties, but I was born in the seventies, and so I have my parents were seventies eighties parents in my generation. I think a lot of us are trying to maybe kind of flip things a little bit and how we parent and want to be more open to diverse ways of parenting our kids. But the backgrounds that we have and the experiences we've had growing up does affect us, and we want to find ways that show how how gentle God is and show his character. And while we're disciplining, disciplining our children as well. So I appreciate your you know, sharing your history and how you got into this. Then I'm wondering, if parents are looking for parenting coaching, is this the type of coaching that's best form? But how come parents know if this is the type of parenting coaching that they should pursue first and check out my website and see if that is something that is exciting to you. I think parents who want to grow in their parenting skills, or parents who feel stuck or defeated are great candidates for coaching. I think if you want a coach who's just going to give you a couple of things to do in your kids to be fixed, that's not probably the right client for me, because I'm not about fixing your kids. I'm about helping the Holy Spirit come alongside you and grow you as a parent, and then our kids change from that. That's wonderful, that's good. It's good that you're clear about exactly who is the one that should be working with you versus because there's so many different types of coaching available, and so it's good for people to see this is something that I actually need, the specific type of parenting coaching. So thank you for that clarity. And what ideas can you offer for just practical tips ways that parents can get started playing with our children. There are just some things that we can do to be more hands on with our children and spend time more practical tips. So I know you have some tips for us, and I'd love to hear what they are. Yeah, So the first one is five to ten minutes minimum, But that's a great place to start of putting our phone down and being intentional with our kids and allowing them to lead the play. So it doesn't matter what they are wanting to do. If we give them that power of leading play for five to ten minutes, over time, our discipline needs will go down just by giving our kids intentional time where they get to have some control, make choices, and we follow their lead, which is so important because kids so often are always being told what to do, where to be, how to be, and so giving them that opportunity to lead and really just five to ten minutes makes a difference over time. The second thing I would do is what I call micro play, and this is thirty seconds to five minutes of something that you enjoy. So it could be having a quick little tea party with your kids, say you want to drink your coffee hot, pour them some tea, and just make it really short, really simple, or even a dance party, you know, just simple things that don't take a lot to set up, they don't take any pep, they don't take a lot of mess to clean up after, but just really short things that show your kids. I delight in you. I enjoy spending time with you and for ourselves. As we become more playful and we start enjoying our own life and that own microplay for ourselves, we are more fun people to be around, and our kids will start to like us more as well. I love that. I love that because so many times we think, oh, well, you know, I need to set aside this huge amount of time, because we in our minds we're thinking is this monopoly? Or is going to take three hours? You know? But like you said, micro play in these these a little short moments, and then you also mentioned the consistency of short moments with them over time, and that really adds up. And so do you think that sort of impacts their memory of their time spent with mom and dad, even if they're just small moments. Yes. And if you can do some micro play or a few minutes of play playfulness after discipline or after you've blown it, it helps to repair the relationship faster. And it also helps your child's memory to kind of wash away some of the harshness that you may have had, and your child is going to remember the end where you were playful together and it kind of helps, you know, fix that for the future. Oh that's good. I never would have out of that, but that is that's and that scientific and it's proven because the last thing we remember is the last thing that happened. So you're sandwiching the discipline with the play and it softens the blow a little. So yeah, that's good. Well okay, So on that note, how can we or how can play be a way then to disciple our kids? How do we how do we? Because discipleship's a big you know, it's a really big thing in the Christian community, that's what we talk about raising our kids for Christ, teaching them the ways of the Lord. So how can play and discipleship go together. Yeah, so mister Rogers said, it's the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives. And if our kids are playing with the word, and if we and as moms and the Holy Spirit are the people who help them to play, then we get to make this huge impact on our kids. We get to model the abundant life that Jesus offers. And like in Psalm sixteen eleven, it's as you show me the path of life in your presence is complete joy and at your right hand or pleasures forever yea. And so by playing and making discipleship fun, we are modeling abundant life for our kids. We're showing them that this is a life they want to live as opposed to something boring. And also often we tell kids sit still, listen to the story. But when we tell children, especially under the age of to sit still, all of their focus, all of their brain power, is going towards holding their bodies still, and so they don't have that focus towards to use towards the story we want to be sharing with them. So when we can add playful intentional movement, then that is helping them to focus on the story and also learning through their bodies, because God design their kids to learn through their bodies before their brains. And so when we can play through a Bible story, whether it's still seated, but like if you're telling a story of Jesus on a boat, you have them rock or you have them row. It doesn't mean you need them to have be running around, you know, but adding in small intentional movements can help them to then learn the story through their body. And then if we engage their imagination and emotions in telling them these stories, then that's also helping them to really experience these Bible stories and not just hear them. But for kids, the emotions that they pretend feel like real emotions. So if they are pretending to walk up to the tomb and see Jesus as an in there and they experience pretend surprise, that's real surprise, that's real wonder and real like curiosity of what happened? Where is he? And then experiencing the joy of he's not dead anymore, he's risen like that's real for them as they pretend and play it, And imagine the change in a kid who's really experienced witnessing the resurrection versus a kid who's heard the story and maybe knows the story in their head, but hasn't experienced it through play. Exactly. Yes, experiencing the Word of God through play, because that's what our kids do. That's their job. Their job as children is play. And so when, like you said, when we can bring to life the things that we're trying to disciple them. We want to teach them the Bible, we want them to know about the Lord. But when we bring it to life by allowing them to play with it, it just it's that's discipleship. And I think sometimes we forget that because a lot of times, you know, we're looking as homeschool moms looking for curriculum, looking for the things that we can just set them down to, say, memorize these five scriptures and maybe you get a sticker or maybe get a reward or whatever. And that's also a form of play. But but even just acting it out and allowing the kids to experience, like you said, the experiencing the experience of the Bible passages and bring it to life through play, I think that, yeah, it's just beautiful. And we can also take what our kids are naturally inclined to play with Say it's blocks and they're building a tower. As mom, we can come up beside them, Wow, look at how hard you were working on this tower. Did you know? In the Bible it tells us that God is our strong tower. Isn't that cool? And we can just add small faith conversations to the ways they're already playing. And that is just like, you know, kind of drip feeding discipleship in what they're already interested and curious about exactly. And that is what you just said means that parents, it's a great idea just to kind of be attentive to when they're playing. Win's a good moment to just slide something in because you never know, like that that moment when they're building the tower, if you're open to the Holy Spirit to say, look, this is a good moment to teach your child about me being a strong, strong tower, or just being open in those different moments. And I think that's also probably a big part of what you teach with parenting and coaching your clients on how to interact with our own children but in a playful way. And so I have a question about as adults. Okay, so I've recently like I'm I consider myself now like officially middle age, and I'm just like, i am ready to do all the fun stuff that I put on hold for the past two decades, and I'm just ready to play. And so I've discovered that it's okay for me to want to play. And I realize that's one of the reasons I love going into stores like Barnes and Noble. There's something about those toys, those books, And yes, I stayed over there for years because I homeschooled my kids, so that was my section. But I still like to look at those toys and see what, you know, what did Barnes and Noble come up with the next? But I am loving the idea of parents incorporating play into our adult lives, and I would love to hear what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I think the first thing that we need to do as adults to incorporate more play is to understand what play really is. Because if we believe that play is blocks and barbies and maybe Bunco and board games, then that is not as easy to access because some of us don't like those things. And so to think I've got to play a board game to play like, that's not that doesn't bring us joy. So for me, I like to define play as anything that helps us to experience the abundant life and complete joy of God. And so that might be taking a walk, it might be drinking your tea hot, you know, it might be doodling on the side of your planner or your to do list, whatever way God has put in you to experience his joy discovering what that is. And often those things we like when we were kids, there is a grown up version of it that we still enjoy. And so just kind of being intentional, like when I drink tea every day, it's not always play. But when I am intentional and I use heavy cream instead of just a splash of skim milk, and I sit and I invite odd into the moment and typically hide behind the kitchen counter so my kids can't see me, then it becomes play. And then I'm entering into a moment with the Holy Spirit and just feeling his presence and the blessing of the life He's given me. But if I'm just drinking it cold or after you know, it's been sitting on the counter for a while, then that's not playful, and so just being intentional to invite the Holy Spirit into those moments that we are enjoying our life is a great first step. Yes, yes, absolutely to everything you just said, because that's where I am in my life right now. So I'm just like I am open to discovery of all the things that have been pushed down for years, and I think that's what brings so much joy to our lives when we are open to seeing. Okay, God, what what did you put inside of me that makes me happy? Me happy when I was a child, and it still would make me happy today. But like you said, there's an adult version most likely of that same thing. But I like you. I love my tea and I love my walks and journaling and those kinds of things make me happy. And as I discover more, I find myself more joyful, even with my kids who were now growing up. But still we have so much fun together because I'm tapping into the things I love. So that's probably another point to make is as we become more playful and open to understanding ourselves, and we have more space in our lives to really enjoy that time with our kids as well. Absolutely, I have like a special set of watercolor paints that are mine that my kids don't get to use, but I pull them out when we pull out their paints, and we parallel play and we paint together. But you know, I've made it a grown up version. I have kind of not the you know, Crayola washable right little paint palette. But it's not something that I have a great talent at, but it is something that I enjoy and I could do with my kids at the same time but still feel like I am playing as well. I love that. Yeah, so that's exactly I love that those are some ideas that we can They're practical tips that we can put to work, like right away, Like just work alongside our kids doing what we love while they're doing what they love. And it's a form of play. I love that. So can you please tell us about I know you have a podcast, and what are some of the topics that we can expect to hear on your show? Yeah. So I love talking about discipline and discipleshift playfully, and so I will talk about playful spiritual disciplines that we can do either for us as moms or along with our kids. I have a series on Growing in Patience that came out this year that was super popular, and I love to look at scripture through a parenting lens. Paul felt he was a father to the church in the New Testament, and so there's a lot, especially of his letters that I love to look at and dig into about what does God's words say for us as parents and how we can disciple our kids using you know, this abundant life with them and modeling God's unconditional love and his truth for our kids. Yes, yes, okay. What's the name of your podcast, Playfully Faithful Parenting? Okay, Playfully Faithful Parenting. Which where can we find your podcast on most every podcast platforms? Yeah? Ok yeah, okay, awesome, so Apple Podcasts, Spotify all the places. Second, our listeners actually reach you for coaching or to listen to your podcast or see any services and products that you offer. My website is the best place to find me, and that's created to play dot com. Okay, wonderful joy. This has been such a pleasure, and so I thank you so much for bringing this very playful and lively conversation to our podcast today. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Well, I certainly hope that you enjoyed that interview today with Joy Windling. I really enjoy talking with her. So let's talk about some of this week's takeaways from the show. First of all, sometimes we'll need to peel away from our busy adult lives, put down our phones, and set aside time for play with our kids. Secondly, engaging in microplay can be a useful way to both disciple and discipline our kids. And Lastly, as parents, we can incorporate more play into our adult lives to feel more fulfilled and joyful. I like the scripture that says the joy of the Lord is our strength, and there's also another verse that says that we should come before God as little children. So I love thinking about how that even as adults, God cares about our well being, cares for our joy, and although every day is not a happy breeze and is not always joyful, he wants to give us his joy in place of sadness. And starting with that concept in mind, for us the mom the woman after God's own heart, as we grow immature in our faith and learn to receive the joy of the Lord, we can then have the strength that we need to pour that joy into our families and into our kids. As always. To see show notes, please be sure to visit my website at Christian Homeschoolmoms dot com, where you can view all the links and resources that my guests mentioned on the show. And I hope that you've been having a great school year. For some of us, it's the end of the year and perhaps you're enjoying end of year celebrations at the time of this recording, but the summer has quickly approached us, and for that reason, I'll plan to be back in just a few weeks, with episodes a bit more frequently over the summer, as many families will be considering the homeschool option for the fall. So I am looking forward to connecting with you more this summer, and until the next time, Happy homeschooling.