I do this thing where I stand in the kitchen at half past four holding my phone, knowing exactly what I want and having no idea how to ask for it. What I want is something to do with my two year old. What I don’t want is a list.
That gap is the bit I find most interesting about my job, and it’s the thing PLAI™ is really for. Not searching. Deciding.
Age is the easiest thing to know, and the least useful
If you tell me a child is four, I know almost nothing about what will work for them this afternoon. Four year olds who’ve just come out of a long day at nursery and four year olds who’ve been indoors since breakfast need completely different things, and they’re the same age.
What actually decides whether an activity lands is a handful of much more ordinary details. What state your child is in right now, wound up or flat or somewhere in between. How much room you’ve got. How much time, honestly, not optimistically. Whether mess is survivable today. And what’s already within arm’s reach, because an activity that needs a trip to the shop is not an activity, it’s a plan.
Those are the things PLAI™ is paying attention to. Not a profile of your child in general, but the shape of this specific afternoon.
What’s worth mentioning
You don’t have to describe your child well. That’s worth saying, because I think a lot of us assume we need to get the description right before the answer can be any good.
In practice, “she’s shattered and I’ve got ten minutes before dinner” is a far more useful thing to say than a careful paragraph about her personality. So is “he’s been bouncing off the walls since we got in”. So is “I’ve got nothing in the house and no energy”. Those sound like complaints. They’re actually specifications, and they’re the ones that narrow things down fastest.
The other thing worth mentioning is how your child likes to start, because that varies more than people expect. Some children pile straight in. Others need to watch for a while before their hands join, which is its own way of taking part, and an activity with a low open doorway suits them much better than one that asks them to perform from the first second.
One, on purpose
The part I’d defend hardest is that what comes back is a single activity rather than a shortlist. That isn’t a limitation we haven’t got round to fixing. It’s the whole reason the product is shaped this way, and it’s the bit I’ve come to believe in most.
A shortlist hands the decision back to you at exactly the moment you have the least left to give it. One suggestion takes the decision off your plate. If it doesn’t fit, tell it so and try again, which takes seconds and is still less work than weighing up ten options with a child pulling at your sleeve.
It only has to work this once
I’d love for you to think of it less as a library you’re searching and more as asking someone who knows the options well. You don’t need the perfect question. You just need to say roughly where you are, and then go and do the thing.
That’s the whole ambition, really. One afternoon at a time.