Environments that support or don’t

How many houses have you lived in? Have your neighbours stayed the same or have the families with your friends moved away? Do you have extended family close by? Do you go and spend time with your grandparents and play with the kids who live near them? Do you spend time as a family all of the time with your cousins? Do you go to the same school as them? Are they part of your group of friends or are they helping you or you helping them manage on the playground?

Do you go to the same school as your sibling(s)? Do you know their friends well as they know yours? Or is it hard because its obvious that you struggle to interact with the others in your grade? How much of a gap is there between your grade level and your siblings? Are you competing in the same sports or completely different so that you get to interact with their friends or you don’t know them at all because your parents are split between the different sports on the weekend / after school.

Does the local park have enough equipment for a group of you to play on the same thing at the same time – is the piece of equipment big enough or is there only 2 swings and nothing else to do in the entire park other than play on the grass? How does that impact on how you spend your time in the park? And what you ‘have’ to pack to take with you or the types of games that you have to think up or the types of games that you can be ‘forced’ into playing because you won’t get enough turns on the things that you like to do.

Do you travel as a family during the holidays and as a result have a different type of relationship with your sibling(s), where you spend intense and long periods of time with them and then want to spend time differently when you are back in your own home so that you can play with your friends? Or because of where you live you spend and enjoy playing with variety and depth with your sizing and as a result have skills that others don’t because you can play with individuals of all ages easily because you are used to modifying what you do in group situations where others want to play with you.