Why Kids Often Play Separately When Friends Come Over (And What To Do About It)
Last Saturday, I set out a bowl of goldfish crackers and squeezed lemons for lemonade while my 7-year-old daughter Lila waited for her first-grade friend Mia to arrive. Rain streaked the kitchen window, and I’d straightened up the living room half an hour earlier, shoving all the stray Lego pieces under the coffee table and fluffing the bean bags. When Mia kicked off her rain boots and ran to the living room, I lingered by the doorway to check how things were going, like I always do. What I saw surprised me, even though I’ve seen the same thing a dozen times before: Mia pulled a coloring book out of her backpack and sat at the small craft table, while Lila kneeled on the rug pulling out her own Lego bin to build a castle. For 20 minutes, they barely spoke. They were in the same room, but they were playing completely separate from each other.
My first thought, the one I always have first, was Did something go wrong? Are they mad at each other? Am I a bad host for not fixing this? A month earlier, my 8-year-old son Sam had his cousin over, and the whole first hour, Sam worked on a model rocket at the dining table while his cousin sat on the couch playing a handheld game. I’d almost marched over there and suggested they pull out the Switch for multiplayer Mario, like I was checking a box for what a good playdate should look like.
I brought this up with Lila’s first-grade teacher at our recent parent-teacher conference, actually. I asked her if it was weird that almost every playdate we host has at least an hour where the kids are doing their own thing, not interacting at all. She laughed and said she gets this question from almost every parent. Most of us think parallel play is just for toddlers, but kids between 5 and 10 do it all the time, and it’s not a sign that things are broken. It’s just how they recharge after a week of structured school, where they’re expected to work in groups, follow shared schedules, and talk nonstop all day long. At a playdate, they don’t want more forced interaction. They just want to be in the same space as someone their age, doing whatever feels good in the moment.
I thought about when I was 10, and my best friend would sleep over at my house. We’d drag our sleeping bags into the living room, pull out our own Babysitter’s Club books, and read for an hour and a half without saying a word. I remembered that feeling, how calm it was, how I didn’t feel the need to fill every second with talking. I’d forgotten that that was my favorite part of sleepovers, not the loud games or the scary stories. I was just projecting my adult idea of “fun” onto my kids, where being together has to mean constant engagement.
I’ve tested this out over the last couple months, stopping myself from jumping in to fix what I thought was a problem. The first thing I changed was how I check in. Instead of popping my head in and saying “Why aren’t you two playing together?” I just bring over a fresh bowl of crackers or a refill of lemonade and leave it at that. If no one says they’re bored or upset, I turn around and go back to what I was doing. That Saturday with Lila and Mia, that’s exactly what I did. After I dropped off the lemonade, I went back to the kitchen to fold laundry, and 20 minutes later, I heard Lila hold up a little blue brick and say “Look, this is a cat that matches the one you’re coloring.” Mia got up, walked over to the rug, and they spent the next hour building a whole village around her drawing. If I’d pushed them to play together the second I saw them doing separate things, I think they would have felt awkward, and never gotten to that point on their own.
Of course, sometimes it does go wrong. Last month, Sam had a new neighbor kid over, and Sam wanted to play tag outside while the other kid just wanted to sort his fidget spinner collection by color at the kitchen table. Sam came moping over to me 10 minutes in, saying “He doesn’t want to play with me.” Instead of forcing the other kid to go outside, I tried a small adjustment I’d picked up, and brought both of them together. I said “Sam loves running around outside, and you love sorting fidgets. What if we leave the back door propped open? Sam can stop by any time to check out the fidgets between laps, and you can go outside whenever you feel like it. No one has to do anything they don’t want to.” Both of them thought that was a perfect plan. Sam ran around for 25 minutes, popped in every five minutes to show the other kid a weird bug he found, and by the end of the hour, the neighbor kid was outside chasing Sam around the oak tree.
I still catch myself defaulting to the old way of thinking. If I have a bunch of kids over, I still have to pause and remind myself that a good playdate doesn’t have to look like the ones in movies, where everyone’s laughing and playing the same group game the whole time. Last week, we had three kids over after school for birthday cupcakes, and one sat on the couch watching a cartoon, two built a fort in the basement, and my kid switched back and forth between both groups every 10 minutes. No one was upset, everyone left talking about how fun it was, and I didn’t say a word.
I still mess up sometimes—last month I pushed my nephew to play a competitive game with Sam, and it ended with both of them storming off frustrated because neither wanted to lose. I’m still learning, and I don’t think there’s a perfect rule for every playdate. But mostly, I’ve learned that kids know how to be together, even if it doesn’t look the way we expect it to.
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