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Snakes, Ladders, and The Fox Thief: Navigating the Intensity of Holiday Games
22 Plays16 days ago
Welcome to Episode 23 of On the Ground Parenting! Hosts Sandy, Sam, Kelly, and Justin (with a special guest appearance by our engineer, James) dive into the world of indoor and outdoor games. As families prepare for intense periods of togetherness over the holidays, the team explores how to use games to build connection rather than conflict.
The conversation begins with a focus on cooperative board games. Justin explains that for younger children still developing emotional regulation, playing as a team toward a shared mission—like catching a "fox thief"—helps establish a healthy relationship with play before introducing the high stakes of winners and losers. Sandy shares how adding sound effects to classic games like Snakes and Ladders can help a child navigate the "downs" with excitement rather than disappointment.
The hosts also share a list of family favorites ranging from high-energy activities like Happy Salmon to the adult-favored Pictionary (which at Sam’s house involves easels and poster boards). Whether you are engaging in rubber ducky races in the driveway or a spontaneous Talent Show where every performance gets a standing ovation, this episode is packed with ideas to keep the holiday spirit light and connected.
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A Call for Support:
This episode also serves as a special platform for the Muskoka Family Focus Parent Ed team to request support, either with a direct donation through Canada Helps, or by signing up for our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/OnTheGroundParenting. Donations over $20 are tax-deductible. We need your financial support to ensure we can continue offering free educational programming and keep the podcast running.
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Transcript
Introduction and Call for Support
00:00:00
Speaker
On the Ground Parenting is a project of Muskoka Family Focus, a registered Canadian charity. They rely on your support to keep this show going and to continue their work helping families.
00:00:10
Speaker
To show your support and to make a donation, please visit tinyurl.com forward slash OGPDonate. Your support is greatly appreciated.
Meet the Hosts
00:00:20
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Music
00:00:45
Speaker
Hi everyone and welcome back to On the Ground Parenting. This is a podcast provided to you by the parent ed staff from Muskoka Family Focus. And my name is Sandy and I'm joined with my colleagues, Sam, Kelly, and Justin.
00:01:01
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Woohoo! We're here.
How Can Games Foster Emotional Regulation?
00:01:03
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And we've been talking about there might be a lot of time to spend intensely with families coming up real soon. So how will that be for you?
00:01:18
Speaker
What have you got planned? Will you be actually getting together with other groups of people or maybe, maybe not, but there might be space for games. So we want to talk about things that you might do, activities and recreational things outside. But when you're inside, what games do you like to play?
00:01:39
Speaker
Justin, what happens in your house with your gang? This might not be the topic for my family. I'm a cards and games person per se, but um my partner is not really that interested in those sorts of things historically. My kids, though, however, are. And so we will drag her unwillingly sometimes to the table and get her seated. And we'll play what's big at our house are these cooperative board games.
00:02:07
Speaker
We're trying to bring the notion of competition in skillfully into the group so that everybody has a healthy relationship with self before we start bringing in winners and losers, per se, ah every time over and over again, especially when emotional regulation during the actual time of play is not a skill that is you know solidified and consistent yet, especially for our six-year-old.
00:02:34
Speaker
So yeah, a lot of these cooperative games where we're all on a shared mission to catch the thief, the fox thief or or what have you. I think that's so wise to understand that having a winner before a child is able to understand what that means, the significance, and to be able to roll with that and to embrace the celebrating of someone else's ability or skill, So the cooperative games are a great launch for families with kids playing games.
Family Dynamics in Competitive Games
00:03:08
Speaker
I mean, we shouldn't start with Monopoly. Like that's not the way the place to start. Is that what you're telling me right now? but but I'm kidding because I'm sure that we've all had the Monopoly board fly across the room at some point when you're playing. I love playing games, but I'm very cautious about which games I play in my neurodivergent house because those regulation bits are still tricky at times when there's competition. But when my husband and I go and play games with our friends, it is on There's so much competition. it is just wild. there's yeah
00:03:44
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It's so extreme that we actually have easels with large poster board for Pictionary now. like That's how into it we get. I'm twitching. Pictionary is my fave game.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, Sandy, you can come play with us. So Muskoka Family Focus Parent Ed Pictionary Night. Oh, yes, please. and And yes, even our engineer is adding a comment there that he wants to join us. So yeah. And Justin, whether your wife wants to come or not, she's more than welcome. No chance. Absolutely no chance. she'll Somehow she'll have report cards to do in July. if you try that Or root canal.
00:04:29
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Well, when you mentioned, Sam, about your neurodivergent kids and you're cautious about the game, well, i want to tell you that that was my parents. We all started playing and everybody was happy. But if one parent seemingly was ahead of the other, it was tough for them. So we kids were sort of, you know, mouths open looking at our parents like, um you're having a tough time with seeing your partner get ahead of you. so ah I could appreciate all
Adapting Games for Neurodivergent Family Members
00:04:59
Speaker
of that. Oh, I love that. My one son is determined that I cheat every time we play Skippo because I win quite often. i'm like, it isn't that I cheat when we play Skippo. It's that I'm paying attention to what you're doing, what I'm doing, but he still thinks I cheat.
00:05:12
Speaker
So anyways, whatever. i don't cheat. but How about for you, Kelly? Oh, there's so much rich elements in this. I was thinking about how we pick games depending on who's at the table. And sometimes we pick a game that it's easy for everybody to play and we can sit on the couch and play across the room. Like Scattergory sometimes works well for that. And you can have a large group of people. But my one niece, we call her the evil games genius because she is extremely skilled at all games and loves them. So we are not at the cooperative stage now. We are at the competitive stage where every adult tries to beat the kid and doesn't always do it successfully.
00:05:57
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It is funny, isn't it, how there can be one person who just seems to have horseshoes, right, when it comes to game playing. My friend's husband was like that. He won it, you know, all the time. And even when you thought when I had one card left that I was ready to get out, then inevitably, you know, he would either have me miss a turn or I had to pick up two 22 or something like that.
00:06:23
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Yeah, so recently we played um Snakes and Ladders
Favorite Games and Adaptations
00:06:27
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with my grandson, who is, he's 4.75. He's claiming that he's 44 years old, and that brings a little bit of a chuckle for us. But he knows he's going to be five on his birthday. But, you know, he he has this little bit of um character role playing that he brings forward every now and again. But it was a good experience of snakes and ladders. There were a couple of times where I thought, oh, this might be a little bit rough for him. But I think how we handled it, too. So when we had to go down the snake, we would go o he down the snake. So it wasn't as if it was going to be a horrible thing. And we talked to him about how he was, you know, not as far ahead as he was before. So he had awareness. But just the sound effects that we made, I think helped him come into that bit of excitement. And we didn't gloat too much when we did get to climb the ladder ahead of somebody. So it was all in how we were regulating our emotions within that experience for him.
00:07:28
Speaker
It's funny, your sound effects made me think of how we sometimes add sound effects into lots of games. Like we play a game called talk, which is a cards and marble. Sometimes people call it marbles. It's very similar to trouble or sorry. I can't remember which one, but inevitably somebody goes did de dee as they count their marbles. And then everybody else has to do it. Yeah.
00:07:50
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It's just silly. Those are fun things that suddenly emerge, right? They're just spontaneous. And and it just, everyone seems to be in a little bit of a lighthearted mood when it comes to game playing.
00:08:03
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What are favorite games that happen in your household? Well, not Skippo anymore, because apparently I cheat. so right But we do love a lot of card games. We do play Skippo fairly often. And we take it with us when we go places, because you can play it anywhere, as long as you have ah a table or a small surface. um But Pictionary is very popular, dare I say, with the adults. Cards Against Humanity is always very entertaining. But yeah, it's... And actually during COVID, Cards Against Humanity made public a family version of the game that you could print off yourself, which was really great. It was fun. um We did play that a few times.
00:08:43
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But yeah, Pictionary comes out every time we have a ah gathering for sure. It's always fun to see what happens when you're drawing the pictures, how someone can get a clue with a straight line or a curve. it's It's just hilarious how that happens. It is. It really is.
00:08:59
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We have so many favorite games. Lillian likes to collect games. The two that that came to mind instantly, one's called Happy Salmon, where you have a stack of cards and people are running around and you have to find somebody doing the same action. There's four actions. And once you find somebody doing the same action, you can discard the card. So it's like a five minute game, but it gets everybody like moving and giggling
Outdoor and Winter Family Activities
00:09:22
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and having a good time.
00:09:24
Speaker
And I can't remember the other one. It'll come back. I'll come back to it. But I'm making a list. You have to remember it because I'm making a list. Sometimes it's even the recall of, you know, when you learned how to play a game. So some of the games we're talking about that might be a little more modern, I would say, or they might be games that you learn over a period of time, something like those, like the Crazy Eights, just the deck of cards with games.
00:09:51
Speaker
And I'm thinking about Euchre. And I can remember when I was maybe 11, 11, And I was taught how to play euchre. And I can remember being outside in the summer. It was older kids at this farm. And they taught me how to play euchre. And it's a game that I continue to love to play today. I love Euchre too. That's a fun one. Yeah. Hey, there's four of us here. We could have Euchre partners. How about you, Kelly? Do you play Euchre? could play Euchre.
00:10:19
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We could play Euchre right now. we do play Euchre and it's funny that I really like it, but I also have a bit of a bump against it because my mom loves to play Euchre, but it only is a four player game.
00:10:35
Speaker
And so it's a kind of a funny game to play at Christmas. When people have to sit and watch because only four people play. Set up tables. Progressive. Yeah, you set up tables. are So we had our big family Christmas gathering this past weekend. And my aunts and uncles like and my parents, everybody loves to play games and loves to play cards. And they play euchre all the time. They had a round robin going.
00:10:59
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of euchre when we we arrived a bit late. We had other things to do, so we didn't get to go in time to play cards. But yeah, i walked in the door and like, they're playing, they have a round robin table. They're like, this is just very organized. I'm i'm really impressed.
00:11:12
Speaker
but Yeah, it is one of the things I think about with games. Is it a table game? Is it a living room game? Can it have flexible numbers? The other game I was going to mention that I've been playing since I was a Pathfinder, since I was a girl guide, is called Encore. And it's a singing game where you pick a word kind of like Pictionary in the sense that... You get this word and your team has to sing a song with sunshine. And if you get it, if you get that, then we have to sing a song with sunshine and you volley it back and forth until nobody can do it. And you need like eight words, but it's so easy to have 20 people play it. And everybody's brain, even if you don't think you know a lot of lyrics, you usually know some genre. So it's quite, it just brings people together. You can play it in the living room. The laughter is big. That's a, It brings to mind Pitch Perfect and their sing-off or whatever they did and Pitch Perfect. ahly yeah yeah Riff Off. That's what it was. yeah Something that I'm contemplating too, you mentioned we really need to be aware of how many people will be present and will the games include. So it might be that we have a you know a few different kinds of games happening if the one game won't include more than X number of people. Right. In the past couple of years online, you would see these different types of games that were sort of skill, you know, where did you ever see the one with the roll of toilet paper that you're winding up with the glass on it? so
00:12:40
Speaker
Minute to win it games. Yes. So those kinds of games as well, too. Have any of you tried any of those? Yes, we do those on New Year's Eve. So we get together with my cousin and his wife, who happens to be my best friend on New Year's Eve, and we do Minute to Win It games. um It's pretty fun.
00:12:59
Speaker
Their one child, their youngest child, is so competitive. It's wild. They're just a chip off the block when it comes to their dad because he's very competitive as well. So it's really entertaining. The best part is watching them play the games, honestly. Yeah. It really reminds me of what birthday parties were like when I was a kid.
00:13:19
Speaker
So all the different games that you everybody would be included in and, you know, like teams, you know, somebody might win, but there was nothing really that you got. You just had the status. When it comes to outside, what happens for games that you might be doing outside? Because it might be that you need that bit of fresh air, you need that movement and anybody have any particular game or is it just open play? How do you handle that? Our house in the winter, there's ah quite a hill behind it. So we tend to be doing toboggan kind of games. so how much can you bank? How far can you go? How many sleds can you pull together?
00:13:58
Speaker
And it just ends up being a ah day or a few hours of building and testing and testing and building and laughing and those sorts of things. Just just get out and play. Same. We have quite a bit of space around our house and a mom here on the property that is an outdoor education specialist. So the games are aplenty when it comes to outside. There's chickens here. There's dogs.
00:14:28
Speaker
ah There's cats. So there's, there's lots to do. um One thing that springs to mind right away is we have a long winding downhill driveway. It's almost like 250 meters long.
00:14:41
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And there is a trench all the way alongside or a ditch that runs along a good portion of it. And when we get to the big melt in March, We try to clear it out as much as we can. And then we do for for probably half a day, more than once, if the melting is that abundant, is we do like rubber ducky races in the water and it gets very competitive. People are building their own boats or what have you. So that's just the one that comes to mind. For my kids growing up, we were fortunate to have friends who made some luge runs. So we would spend time over at their place. And I can still remember there was two endings that you could go down, but I never had enough control. It was just more or less wherever that tube was going, that's where I went. I i didn't actually feel like I had the control to direct the tube to go to one pathway or the other. But so we've had that. And across the hill, right where we live, um it's a steep hill. And oh my gosh, would the kids ever go down that hill fast? And my grandsons at their property, they named this one hill Snowflake Mountain. And yeah they were young. And so that had significance for them. And we started off with...
00:15:57
Speaker
little toboggans, moved to tubes. And then I think they progressed to skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiles, you know, how it goes as kids age. So there's a lot of activity in at their home too. And they've got a lot of critters outside. So we really like being outside and we snowshoe as well. So we would go off on a trek with the snowshoes and sometimes we have a fire ah in the woods as well.
00:16:22
Speaker
Those are some of the things that we would have fun doing outside. I'm wondering if you have any ideas about
Choosing the Right Games for Gatherings
00:16:29
Speaker
what to introduce when or any sort of hints or tips or be aware of as far as games, whether it's inside or outside. What would you suggest for families who might be looking for a new thing to do this year? What would your recommendation be?
00:16:45
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I love Justin's suggestion of cooperative play to help with those regulation skills when they're younger. So I'm not sure if anyone can think of any other cooperative play games. We don't have many cooperative play games in my house, so I don't really i can't really speak to this.
00:17:01
Speaker
One of the cooperative games that I like best is one called Wonder Woods, where you're teaming up to harvest mushrooms of different species or type.
00:17:12
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And then there's a marketplace where these mushrooms are worth a certain amount each. And you're trying to gain a reward for the team based on how much capital you're able to raise from your harvesting of mushrooms. That's cool. That one's pretty fun. And you learn a lot about mushrooms too.
00:17:31
Speaker
Yeah, that is. And commerce, right? That's another piece. So that's wonderful. Yes. Well, we're talking about games and our engineer, Red Juice Studios, James, he happens to be, i don't know, maybe the most energetic, enthusiastic, game-playing guy that we've been talking with recently. And James, what would you like to add to this topic of games? So when you guys were talking about games that are cooperative, I was New Year's Eve last year, i was um over at my girlfriend's house and she has 13 year old daughter and she suggested a game called Talent Show. I never heard of this before. And I think she was just making it up.
00:18:13
Speaker
But for a 13 year old, this was absolutely one of the most wonderful, beautiful things I've ever heard. So she said, we'll write down some talents like yodeling or opera or whatever, dancing, you know, write them down on a and a thing. We'll put them in a hat. And when it's your turn, you pick one out of a hat and you do your best.
00:18:30
Speaker
And everybody has to cheer like it's the best thing they've ever seen. It's amazing. And it was so much fun. And it was so kind and sweet of a game to make up and tell. So, Violet, I know you're never going to listen to this, I'm sure. But thank you for that game. But, yeah, it was it was like, what a great idea. Like, just write down any random, look would like...
00:18:49
Speaker
you know, dance a jig or, or i don't know, rap, you know, and then have like, you know, grandpa and all the kids and mom and dad and cousins and aunts and everybody taking a turn to do something silly. And the reward that they get is that everybody has to cheer. Like it's the best thing you've ever seen in your life. So yeah, thanks.
00:19:08
Speaker
Back to the show. Well, and thanks for offering that, James. I really like the fact that everyone has an opportunity for input. So to add something so that, you know, it's relevant. You might not pull that yourself, what you put in your own idea, but at least it's in there. And I also like that everyone is cheering so exuberantly.
00:19:31
Speaker
It sounds like it would be very fun and exciting. i want to, I'm going to have to make sure I definitely listen to this podcast a few times so I can write down all the game suggestions. That's a good idea.
00:19:43
Speaker
Well, I think that the idea behind this is recognizing that we're about to come into a time where it's a lot of proximity. It's intense family time together. Most people are not accustomed to being together for this amount of time.
Holiday Greetings and Family Connection
00:20:00
Speaker
And whether it's with your own family, with extended family, extended family and friends or friends, we just want to propose that playing games is a fun way of being together, connecting.
00:20:13
Speaker
So we've already shared what's rising up for us from the ground, unless there's anything else you want to offer. Any further wisdom, Sam or Justin? no I think just get out there and play, whether it's indoors, outdoors, just spend some time together.
00:20:27
Speaker
Well, everyone, it's December 24th, and whatever you may be celebrating, we're wishing you the best. We want to send greetings around the world, acknowledging that you may have snow outside, you may not have snow outside, you may be in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere. I know someone who actually lives in the Southern Hemisphere and who is back home in Cape Breton, enjoying the snow, her children experiencing it for the first time. So wherever you are in the world, may you have the best time together with your family and friends.
00:21:02
Speaker
Wishing you a holiday season. Bye! Bye everyone! Happy holidays!
Acknowledgements and Podcast Support
00:21:17
Speaker
On the Ground Parenting is a production of Muskoka Family Focus's parent education program. It is made possible by the generous donations of listeners like you. If you'd like to make a donation, sponsor an episode, or just ask a question of one of our hosts, go to linktr.ee forward slash on the ground parenting.
00:21:35
Speaker
On the Ground Parenting is produced and published by Red Juice Studios. To learn more, go to redjuicestudio.com. Thanks for listening.