Rule #1: You Must Play Ball in the House

January 07, 2020

Rule #1: You Must Play Ball in the House

We have pretty unconventional family rules. There are eight in total, and my husband and I together made a hand-painted wood sign listing them all, which hangs in our living room. (To be fair: when I say we did it "together," I mean that I came up with the idea, convinced my husband to build the wood sign, started tracing and writing the rules with a paint marker, then got busy and persuaded my husband to do seven of the eight rules on his own. He may or may not bring this up - justifiably - every time someone comments on our rules.)

To give myself a built-in series of eight blog posts (ha!), I'll explain one rule at a time. The first rule is: You must play ball in the house.

When our kids' friends visit, they often read this, frown, and say, "you forgot the word not." But of course, that's the point. In most houses, playing ball in the house isn't allowed, or at least isn't expressly endorsed. In our house, on the other hand ...

(Okay, that video is a couple of years old, but I love it!)

This rule was definitely my hubby's idea, as a rebellion against the idea that active games are reserved for outside. We have to sacrifice some things to make this work - specifically, we have almost nothing breakable anywhere near our open play spaces. And we went years without anything getting broken during an indoor volleyball game, until this past fall when a ball knocked a framed picture off the wall and sent zillions of glass fragments into our carpeting. We spent hours cleaning the darn carpet, but we still play volleyball inside.

In my view, it communicates to our kids (and our visitors) that our home is a place for play and fun, and - since usually at least one grown up gets pulled into the game - it helps us be playful parents, too. And being a playful parent helps create bonds and actually makes discipline easier, experts say.