This Connection Kit is a box that you make of 30 little activities and fun that you can have with your kids at any time to reestablish connection or to foster connection or as a set playdate with your child. This is also a great gift that you can give to a parent of toddlers, preschoolers, preteens, or teens if they are in need of some direction with intentional time with kids, or a great gift to make for parents that are becoming foster or adoptive parents. Read all of the summaries about each activity and then print out the Activity Cards on cardstock or you can paste them onto index cards. Pick out the activity cards you think would work best with your kid(s) and then gather the materials for those activities and put them in a box with the corresponding cards. All of the printables are free. My hope is to help provide resources for parents that are easy to use and help foster attachment in their families.

The Connection Kit is for fun and relaxed play. It’s only goal is connection. It isn’t a time of teaching and correcting. Make up new ways to use the materials that suit your family and each particular child. Often when parents and kids feel out of sync with each other, or if they are just learning to trust each other, there can be lots of power struggles, and lots of guilt on the parents side to correct and help your child move in the right direction. This isn’t that time. This is a time for you to let them feel completely unjudged, a time for you to bumble a little bit (really… pretend like you aren’t good at what the thing is or be really silly about it), it is a time for you to delight in your child. Some of these activities are in fact teaching tools, some work on good touch, some on eye contact, some on asking permission. The lesson or skill that it teaches though is just a bonus of the time together, not the goal. The number 1 goal is connection.