Long gone are the days where parents who wanted to leave the park were told to just walk away and say "bye!" to their child. However, it can be so common for us as parents to feel really powerless when we want to leave the park and our child doesn't want to. This can often correspond with times when we're hungry or tired, and our own feelings can easily bubble up and out into responses we later regret. Putting ourselves in our child's shoes at these times can help us be less likely to respond in harsh ways. Free play, explorative play, these are such innate needs for children, and they're ways that they make sense of the world, explore new abilities, making connections, and release stress. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, children would have been playing freely in these ways a lot. Valuing both our needs and theirs helps us be more likely to feel compassionately connected when we go into the situation of eliciting their cooperation to leave the park. Attachment play, a core part of Aware Parenting, is a beautiful way to create connection, help your child feel deeply valued and cared about, while also eliciting cooperation. In this podcast episode, I read out the child's story of leaving the park from the my new best-selling book, 'I'm Here and I'm Listening'. After the "Go away!" story that I shared in the last episode, this is one of the ones I love next. In the book, I talk a lot about eliciting cooperation. I am so willing for 'I'm Here and I'm Listening' to continue to be a best seller, and to reach the hands, hearts and minds of many many thousands of parents. If you'd like to support me with that, are you willing to share about the book, such as on social media? If you have been thinking of buying it, are you willing to buy it now or really soon, to support it to continue being a best seller? You can buy the paperback on Amazon by searching for 'I'm Here and I'm Listening' on the Amazon store in your country! Or send me a DM for the direct link! Big love xoxox www.marionrose.net