You sit down on the floor with the blocks. Within two minutes you are sorting them by color. Then you remember an email, and you get up to deal with one thing. When you come back they have moved on to something else. I used to love to have fun.
It may also be that you are tired, which is the most ordinary reason there is.
01
What you do
You turn the game into a task. There is a way to build the tower, and you are showing it.
You play with your phone face up beside you.
You suggest something with a point to it: a puzzle, a worksheet, tidying up together.
You are relieved when it is over, and then sorry that you were.
People call it being a serious person, or not being the fun parent.
It may cost you the hour itself, which goes by while you are somewhere else.
02
What the getting up may be protecting
"If I'm not producing, I don't know who I am."
An hour on the floor makes nothing. Under Output, time that produces nothing may be hard to stay inside. The words this library has for that are restlessness and a low-grade dread in stillness.
Read about Output →"Stillness is where it catches me."
Sitting down may mean nobody is watching the rest: the dinner, the inbox, tomorrow. Here the words are a sustained low-level alertness and not being able to sit still.
Read about Ahead →These are two of several, and it may be neither.
03
What is under each
Under Output, the fear may be that without achievement you don't matter. What would answer it is worth that doesn't require performance.
Under Ahead, the fear may be that if you stop managing, something goes wrong again. What would answer it is safety that doesn't require vigilance.
04
One question
Is the problem that you're not producing, or that you're not covered?
Not producing is the Output answer. Not covered is the Ahead answer.
If neither fits, there is not enough to tell.
Some of this may not be a rule. You may be worn out. Some adults don't enjoy pretend games and never did, and that is a preference.
For Output, the ordinary case is someone who works hard, loves it and rests without guilt, and the tell is what happens when the producing stops. For Ahead, watchfulness in a period that really is unstable fits the facts, and the check is whether it continues when things are stable.
The question is there to take something away, which is how subtraction goes. One reason for the getting up comes off the list, or neither does.
05
One thing to try this week
Pick ten minutes and do something that makes nothing. Nothing to photograph, nothing to tidy afterward, nothing to cross off. It can be with your child or without.
Afterward, write one line on what the ten minutes were like. The question above can be asked of that line.
Having fun and breaking out of the routine are part of what this section means by being a kid again.
How the first of these rules looks across a week of parenting is on How the Output Rule Shows Up in Parenting.