The Play Circle

Do you spend much time at home, alone with the children or by yourself?

For me, working from home means I can get stuck in a rut. I get tunnel vision, focusing on the task at hand. I forget to put on the washing. The dishes remain in the sink. I realise too late that I haven’t prepared an after-school snack.

I get disconnected from friends, family and good advice.

When I have a question, there’s no-one to ask.

So I ask Google.

And recently, that hasn’t gone too well.

Bad advice

When creating 100 Toys, I spent a lot of time thinking about getting the articles to show up on Google. You can game the system if you sprinkle a few of the right words into your writing. But it sounds awful.

You get articles like this:

• 25 Amazing Benefits of Open-Ended Play for Kids
• What is open-ended play for kids?
• The benefits of open-ended play for kids
• FAQs: The benefits of open-ended play for kids
• Open-ended play activities for kids
• What is open-ended play for kids in child development?

I can’t bring myself to finish the list. It’s so bad.

But it works.

These practices broke the internet. The top search results were junk, stuffed with the ‘keyword’.

If you can game reliably game the system, you can make money. Sites ‘reviewed’ products, recommending not the best but the one that offered the highest affiliate commission. They bombarded you with video ads.

Search was ruined.

You couldn’t trust what you read anymore.

Google tried to clean it up but now there’s another bogeyman.

I, robot

Now if you search for ‘What is open-ended play’ you get an AI-generated response. It’s better than those spammy sites. All the information is in there but something is still missing.

What if you had a more nuanced question, one that relied on first-hand experience or empathy? Or one that involved knowing something about the other person?

A frightening experience

ChatGPT knows more than I ever will about child development. But it has never sat up until three in the morning holding a terrified toddler with croup who is gasping for air and looking at you imploringly for help that you can’t give.

In that situation, you don’t care what AI thinks.

You want advice from someone who knows that your first instinct is to protect your child, that nothing else matters.

And if your child is going through it right now, it might comfort you to know what I did. I had it with three of my children. Three calls to the emergency services. Three trips in an ambulance. Three shots of adrenaline. Terrifying, but OK in the end. Once you’ve been through it, you understand that the concave chest, gasping and the stridor, that horrible tell-tale bark, will get worse if untreated. You have to take action straight away.

ChatGPT can’t do that, even with its massive brain. Here’s an abbreviated version of its advice:

• Stay calm and comforting
• Use cool, moist air
• Keep your child hydrated
• Keep your child upright
• Know when to seek help

No. Sod that, as we euphemistically say in England. Call an ambulance. Croup always happens at night. You know it’s coming because your child develops the cough during the day. You know she will wake in the night with that bark. Call your GP. Say that you need corticosteroids like dexamethasone or prednisolone. Demand them. Don’t get off the phone until you have them. If you don’t, a night-time trip in an ambulance is all but guaranteed.

I don’t know about you but, as long as you can read between the lines (there are a lot of cranks out there!), I’m happier taking my chances with Reddit.

This is the way the internet is going. Information is free. What really matters is community and human connection.

A confession

You’ll know if I start using ChatGPT. All my stylistic tics will be ironed out. No more clipped writing. No more ‘Ands’ and ‘Buts’ to start sentences.

And I might even use more than one sentence per paragraph.

Or, then again, not.

Actually, I do use ChatGPT, but I use it in a different way. I ask it where I went wrong. I ask it what I missed. And it’s great at that. That’s a job it can do well.

But like the replicants in Blade Runner, the robots who thought they were human, AI will never really know, even if it thinks it does.

I thought this was supposed to be about The Play Circle?

Sorry, another digression.

It turns out there’s a reason for that, which I’ll share with you one day.

Anyway, I’m going somewhere with this, and here we are:

Play with Purpose, reincarnated

During the first days of the COVID lockdown, I created a community for parents who suddenly found themselves working from home with young children who needed to be educated and entertained.

We shared activities and advice. We offered support. It was fun.

And I kept the website.

I had registered the name ‘Play with Purpose’ with a view to rebranding 100 Toys. I was never happy with the word ‘toys’ in the title as I felt there was so much more to what we offered.

The community has lain dormant for three years but if you joined at the time - and around 500 of you seem to have kept your membership - you’ll be able to log straight back in (once it goes live on Wednesday).

Why two community names?

You can think of The Play Circle as everything that’s free. Guides, community, members-only access to articles on the soon-to-launch Play with Purpose website (coming Tuesday!).

Co-Conspirators, then, is for the paid subscribers. If you sign up for an individual newsletter, you’ll find a private feed dedicated to discussing its content. If you join the co-conspirators, you get access to everything.

A really useful engine

I love Thomas the Tank Engine.

The highest accolade anyone could receive in those stories was to be called ‘a really useful engine’.

How proud they would look!

The more I’m in business - if that’s what you call hanging on for dear life while you watch your bank account slowly drain! - the more I’m convinced that the only thing that’s worth doing is to be useful.

At the hospital where my wife works, there are volunteers in their 70s and 80s, far more qualified than anyone else there, and with more than enough money to be comfortable, pushing trolleys, helping the porters and doing all kinds of unpleasant and tedious jobs. They could be at home, or at the golf club, but they choose to be helpful. I’m a long way from retirement, but I agree.

I want to be the volunteer hospital porter of screen-free fun.

Will you join me?

What’s inside?

In the community, you’ll have access to resources, but you’ll also have access to each other.

From speaking to so many of you over the years I have discovered that there are thousands of experts who subscribe to this newsletter: doctors, educational psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, occupational therapists and teachers of all kinds.

But, above all, there are parents (and grandparents!). Real people with real experience of life.

I want The Play Circle to be the most helpful place on the internet.

In it, you’ll get:

• Access to me. I’ll run regular Q&A sessions and live events like webinars, and I’ll be available in the feed if you have any questions.
• A members’ feed where you can meet and discuss what’s on your mind and a series of sub feeds, for special topics, where there’s demand.
• Free guides on a range of topics
• Challenges
• A members’ directory, so you can find like-minded parents near you.
• And many other features, which I’ll add over time.

Join The Play Circle for free here.