In PHQP_0009 Caregiver Self-Care Is Important, Jeff stresses the vital role of recharging for caregivers. On this Playvolution HQ Podcast episode, learn why self-care isn’t selfish but an investment in emotional energy for kids, colleagues, and loved ones. Plus, a DIY explosion activity with film canisters, seven adult responses to child-led play, and innovative loose parts use. Plus, a gravity-defying Dad Joke of the Week! Episode Video Watch Now: PHQP_0009 Caregiver Self-Care Is Important Episode Notes Lots Of Self-Care Related Links 7 Common Adult Responses to Child-Led Play Fun With Explosions The Caregiver Self-Care Is Important Transcript Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I'm Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play...on with the show. So, I was really looking forward to starting the show off with a little bit of conversation about how I really love watching concrete buckle and decay and crack over time. But that got pushed out of the way because a hunk of concrete I was watching buckle and crack and break down over time made a big change and a couple of hunks of it broke loose. And I was all excited to talk about that. But then I noticed on a recent walk that they were gone. And then I saw them and I was delighted because as we talked about one, play grows from inside the player and two, loose parts are awesome. A couple of neighborhood kids picked them up and they were using these hunks of concrete as bases at the local playground for a kid version of baseball. Now, it wasn't baseball because they didn't have nine people to make, enough people to make out nine people on each team and it was just five or six of them playing. But they were making it work because again, play comes from within child. And they found these, they found the bits and pieces they needed to make a field and play commenced and that's awesome. So play is sparked by the minds of the children playing and loose parts are awesome. Just a little bit of follow up on those two things here. We'll talk about my joy of observing concrete fall apart later. Topic one, core values. Part nine, like I mentioned last time, we're talking about caregiver self-care and its importance. Because the work of a caregiver is to be emotionally available, to be present in the moment with the children. That means being right here, right now. And that's really difficult. We talked about that in one of the earlier episodes about being right here, right now as being the core. But what that does is it takes a lot of emotional labor. There's plenty of physical labor in early learning but a big part of it is that emotional labor because we're giving our emotional resources away all the time and it's a limited resource. And so we're doling it out little bit by little bit by little bit all day long to the kids in our care, to our coworkers, to the parents we work with in our program, maybe to the administrators we work with. We're trying to bring some home to our sweetie pie and maybe our children and dog, your house plant. You wanna be present for them too. And it's really easy to get drained. And it turns out that professional caregivers are often very, very good at the doing of the emotional labor but they fall short when it comes to the flip side of that, the taking care of themselves side. And that can really be a problem because if you don't fill your cup up again, you run out of resources to give. And one reason I hear for caregivers not taking care of themselves, I've written two books of this topic and I've been talking about it for over 20 years in trainings is sometimes people feel selfish but self-care isn't selfish. Self-care is an investment in yourself and in the investment in the quality of work that you do with other people and the quality of the relationships you have with the people important to you. So we need to really make time for that self-care. You can't pour from an empty cup.
