The playdate itself is great. The kids are playing. Everyone is having fun. You’re catching up with another parent, maybe drinking a hot beverage while it’s still hot, feeling like a functional human being for approximately forty five minutes.
And then everyone goes home and you spend the next two days deprogramming your child.
My kids are sponges. This is wonderful in approximately half of all situations and deeply inconvenient in the other half. They absorb everything — the good, the great, and the things we absolutely do not do in this house. And the absorption rate for behaviors we don’t love is, I have found, significantly faster than the absorption rate for things we actively try to teach them.
A kid comes over who hits when he’s frustrated. Guess who is suddenly hitting when he’s frustrated the very next morning? A kid comes over who doesn’t use please or thank you. Guess who has temporarily lost access to those words? A kid comes over who negotiates every single request into oblivion and gets results. Guess who just discovered that’s an option?
They are watching. They are learning. They are filing it all away for immediate deployment.
And I want to be clear — I’m not calling these kids bad kids. I’m not calling their parents bad parents. Every family has their own rules, their own lines, their own version of what acceptable looks like. That’s normal. That’s the world. I genuinely believe it’s important for my kids to learn how to navigate different environments with different expectations. That’s a real life skill they need.
It’s just that the navigation period between the playdate ending and my children returning to their factory settings is a little bumpy.
What I will say is it cuts both ways. When we have a playdate with a kid who is really directive — we don’t do that, that’s not kind, no thank you — my kids follow suit almost immediately. They rise to meet whatever the social norm in the room is. Which tells me they absolutely know better. They are simply choosing to expand their behavioral options when the opportunity presents itself.
The problem is the opportunities that present themselves most often seem to be on the less ideal end of the spectrum. I’m not sure if that’s a coincidence or if chaos is just more magnetic than calm. Honestly probably the latter.
So after every playdate there’s a gentle reset. A conversation about what we do in our house. A reminder that different families have different rules and that’s okay, and also that our rules still apply regardless of what someone else’s rules are.
It’s a lot of work for a Tuesday afternoon. But I’d rather do the work than stop the playdates.
They need the interaction. They need to figure out how to navigate different people. And honestly, every once in a while a really well-mannered kid comes over and I get a free day.
Those days are everything.
Is the playdate aftermath a universal experience or is it just my kids who come home with a whole new personality? Tell me yours in the comments.
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