family: board games with wildly varied skill levels, so things with randomness worked best (Sorry! teaches both numeracy and coping with loss, Trivial Pursuit does not work with kids who don’t hold the same knowledge base - and then adults ignore you when you correctly answer the question about Orion’s belt, not that I hold grudges)
Watching hockey on tv, because it was the only thing everyone could agree on.
Everyone in the room all reading their own thing. Kids in basement making up games with toys, and adults having boring conversations. (stay downstairs or you will be asked to do food prep, cleaning, or someone will have an idea about everyone going out for a walk together)
And wrestling (both arm wrestling and full body, until I hit puberty and didn’t understand why my dad suddenly didn’t want to wrestle with me anymore ).
Board games, reading books ( both individually and together ), watching kid shows on network TV, which in retrospect was surely more fun for us kids than for the adults. Building things, working on electronics ( may have just been my dad; he had me tearing down various devices for the transistors at age 3 ). Oh yeah, sorting transistors and resistors. Puzzles.
We do very little screen time and rotate through “types” of activities throughout the day. Playing with random toys/dress up/play pretend stuff, reading books together or separate, outside time, building, art/sensory. We do outside time at least 2x per day (before lunch and after nap) if not 3x per day. Outside time can be going for a walk (where they stop every 30 seconds to ask about something or point something out) or doing a walk with them in a stroller, or riding bikes or riding scooters or going to a playground. Art time can be coloring with crayons or with markers or using water color paint or using scissors and glue or stickers. Sensory things are are play dough, kinetic sand, etc. Building is with legos or magnet blocks or or cardboard boxes/blocks.
We get creative with indoor ways to move their bodies around. Yesterday we were using the magnetic blocks and putting colors in different parts of the house and then they have to run to whatever color an adult calls out. Or we put 1 in one spot, 2 in another 3 in another, etc and called out numbers. What I’ve found it is important to move their bodies as much as possible and to have lots of options for each category, so we can do art 3 different times in one day but never repeat an activity. We build multiple times per day, etc.
To prevent too much parent boredom we often put in earbuds and listen to books or podcasts throughout the day. But everyone in the house ends up with approx an hour per day of total screen time, unless it is a work day and them my computer time doesn’t count during work hours.
Honorarily old courtesy of rural 8 channel TV and lots of zero tech camping/hunting time. We played a lot of cribbage and stupid kids games (hide and seek, kick the can) plus weird stuff like dress up and pretend we were news anchors, teach each other dance routines, build large forts. Plus farm specific things like hay bale obstacle courses.
Yes! War. Crazy Eights. Old Maid. Go Fish. Cribbage. Hearts. Gin Rummy. Setback. Others I don’t remember anymore. There are so many cool card games.
Also dominos, Uno, checkers, Chinese checkers, backgammon. We didn’t have that many board games (Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit (many versions of TP) mainly. We also had stuff like chutes and ladders, candyland, connect 4, when we were little.)
We played Pokemon cards and chess! Also watched VHS movies. And built “bug houses” out of mulch in the yard. There wasn’t a lot of overlap in activities we enjoyed due to 4 year and 8 year age gaps.
yeah, big age gaps and various things we were doing meant that we didn’t do a lot of ‘family fun’. There were mostly activities and who needed to be driven where and when were they eating dinner, and homework and housework and church. Fun was primarily individual.
The little boy is crazy about card games, and we could probably play UNO for 24 hours straight.
I have bought several card games recently that appeal to us all and this afternoon we played Tacos vs. Burritos, and something about Unicorns which was fun but I’m not sure we’ve got all the rules down yet. We have promised to play Settlers of Catan on Tuesday.
As an only child with an only child, were any of you who did screen free or low screens childhoods only children? I didn’t have anyone to fight or play with and playing outside held little appeal (suburbia, so no woods to wander off in).
I’m not an only child but I didn’t actually play that much with my sister and we are not and never have been particularly close. I played a lot of cards with mostly my grandmother, leaned (and did a lot of) crochet and knitting from her, and read a LOT.
I wasn’t an only child but my only sibling was 6 years older than me and we were never close/never played together. We had tv but were rarely allowed to watch it. I spent most of my childhood reading in my room, or laying on the floor in the children’s section of the library reading. I also had a long phase with American girl dolls and paper dolls and would have elaborate daily schedules for them with meals and school and chores and stuff. I spent a lot of time outside in my neighbors yard because he had a huge cypress tree with a garden bed around it that I turned into my “pioneer homestead” and gathered random weeds and plants for “food” for the long winter, etc. I basically spent my whole childhood before 12 escaping into alternative realities and wishing I was born in the 1800s haha
Same!
We had a years long elaborate game where we were all old timey orphans in various terrible circumstances but many of them involved building forts or “harvesting” various weeds from the yard.
I don’t remember what we did before the age of 6, but we didn’t have a TV growing up so LOTS of reading, making plans to build stuff and never building it (or building the first 5%), card games, puzzles, running around in circles in the yard, tag, swimming (the college pool was two buildings away and we used to go almost every day), climbing trees, dropping stuffed animals out of second story windows, climbing on stuff our parents wished we weren’t climbing on… mostly like hours and hours of imagining back and forth punctuated by some screaming and running around in circles. Some k’nex and other building toys. Bothering pets.
One of my best friends was an only kid with no TV, in the suburbs. We played a lot of Barbie and she clearly played a lot while I was gone- they all had elaborate stories I had to catch up on when I came over. We both also read a ton. Library trip then sitting reading was a common sleep over. I know she baked with her mom a lot, too, and they’d make baked goods and take them to families from their church.
).
Puzzles.