TL;DR
I read The Playful Way this week and it put words on something I have been circling for four years: the mats were always tools for slowing down, for adults as much as kids. And playfulness, it turns out, is one of the more honest ways out of burnout.
7 min read
The book · Not creativity · Glimmers · Lightness · Micro play · Correction culture · Not just for kids
I read a book this week that explained the origin story of this brand better than I ever have. The Playful Way, by Piera Gelardi, co-founder of Refinery29. Her argument, roughly: what she had been calling burnout, or creative block, was really a disconnection from play. Reconnecting with it was what made her feel alive again.
That landed, because I have watched it play out around me for years. If you are trying to find your new blended identity in motherhood or parenthood, you will go through prolonged periods of stress and overwhelm. For a lot of us, that road ends in burnout if nothing interrupts it.
Here is the part of the book I loved most. We tend to collapse playfulness into creativity, and creativity intimidates people. Not because they are not creative, but because it has been put on a pedestal. If you do not work in a creative field it can feel unattainable, like something other people are allowed to do.
And creativity implies chaos and mess. Which is exactly what an overwhelmed brain cannot take on. Telling a burnt-out mother to get out the paints is not always kindness.
Playfulness is so much wider than that. Maybe you are not the parent crawling on the floor with Playmobil, because it does not come naturally to you. You might be the parent who is light in conversation, the one cracking the jokes at the dinner table. That counts. Gelardi writes about engaging in non-productive things, in lightness, in humour. About finding your own personal flavour of playful rather than performing someone else's.
A good friend and I were talking about playfulness during the week. Shortly afterwards she sent me a video of herself on holiday, doing a backflip into the lake while her sons watched.
Not everyone is going to do a backflip. But that is what breaking through your own limitations looks like. I do not want to get my hair wet. I do not want to be seen in my swimsuit. There are a million reasons to stay on the edge instead of revelling in a playful moment, and most of them sound sensible while you are saying them. Like most things that do us a great deal of good, the better it is for us, the harder we seem to resist it.
Those flashes of playful opportunity, the glimmers, are scattered through most ordinary days. If you learn to spot them, and then learn to habitually take them, I think the de-stressing payoff is huge. It is not about jumping into a lake. It is about meeting your inner child where it is at, and meeting your actual child where they are at. You once had a humour that got buried under efficiency and seriousness and adulthood. Taking the glimmer is just giving yourself permission to enjoy something again. Gelardi calls this becoming a "wonder wanderer": training yourself to notice the small delights you usually walk past.
I know this territory from the inside. I am neurodiverse, and I knew intuitively that I was predisposed to burnout long before I experienced it. It is what happens when you care deeply about doing things well but also need a lot of downtime and recovery time, and you keep choosing high effort anyway. In the brand, in the home, in my architecture work.
The usual coping strategy is the one I built: perfectionism and systems and all kinds of life-saving mechanisms to try and sidestep the crash. Some of them genuinely help. But a system is still effort. You cannot spreadsheet your way into feeling light. Gelardi's whole argument is choosing curiosity over control and experimentation over perfectionism.
And when you do hit a wall, the assumption is that you need more sleep, better food, more water. Those things are real, and they matter. But in my experience they were never enough on their own. A video I watched this week made the same point: alongside the basics, you have to reintroduce lightness on purpose. Gelardi has written elsewhere about play as a tool for handling stress and staying resilient, not a reward for getting through the work.
That can be almost embarrassingly small. Take a coffee down to the park. Look up at the sky. Look at the leaves. Sit and read a book that serves no purpose. Go for a walk and talk with a friend. Nourish yourself, and if there is a lightness to any of it, so much the better.
I want to be careful here: none of this is a treatment plan, and if you are deep in it, proper support matters. This is simply the piece I had been missing, and the piece I see missing for most of the mothers around me. We fight for unicorn spaces and we hand off tasks. We rarely give ourselves permission to be silly.
Part of that is guilt. Playing while the laundry sits there can feel like neglecting your job, especially when your standards are the engine you run on. But the to-do list regenerates overnight whether you played or not. The guilt is not evidence that you did something wrong. It is the sound a high standard makes when you put it down for ten minutes.
Micro play is the name I use for it: small moments of play woven through an ordinary day, with nothing to show for it afterwards. Lying in a hammock on a summer night, rocking, watching a film. Walking through the forest instead of sticking to the path. Paddleboarding in the evening instead of doomscrolling.
If you are still in the baby years, micro play looks different again. Silly voices during a nappy change. Blowing raspberries mid-tummy-time. Dancing around the kitchen with a baby on your hip. The window is thirty seconds, and thirty seconds counts.
And the moves can be smaller still. Remembering to smile instead of defaulting to a serious resting face. Approaching a work problem with lightness: how serious is this really, we will get there if we work together.
What I enjoy most about the concept is how low stakes it is. Nobody is grading it. It does not need a Pinterest board or a free weekend. It is resilience-building disguised as nothing much, and for a brain that cannot take on one more project, nothing much is exactly the right size.
It is also my answer to a fair doubt. The standard prescriptions for presence, mindfulness or yoga or movement, are genuinely good, and genuinely hard to access. They ask for a quiet room, childcare, a free hour, a level of calm you may not currently have. Playfulness asks for none of that. It is a low-lift path to presence that meets you in the kitchen, at the bus stop, mid-tantrum. Play is achievable. And it will make you feel a little better about yourself, which matters, because motherhood is so humbling.
If you do not know what your flavour of playful is, three questions help. What did you do for fun when you were ten? What is the last thing you did that had no outcome attached to it? Are you the floor-crawling parent or the joke-cracking one? Your answers are usually the map.
Standards are a huge part of Swiss life, and I have noticed how much of what I would call correction culture gets directed at kids. How things are done. How things should be done correctly. Do this, not that. Kids do need to understand how things work. But if you find yourself only correcting and only directing, do not forget to splice in a bit of playfulness. It is probably good for the child. It is definitely good for you.
This is where the book collided with our own story. I always knew Studio Huske products would not just be for kids. It is one of our taglines. What I was aiming for with the mats, without having the language for it yet, was a set of tools for slowing down. For doing things more analogue, more manual. Baking, crafting, bike fixing, furniture painting. Not just for the child, for the adult too.
The mat is not the point. The permission is the point: the mess is contained, the cleanup is a wipe, and so the threshold for starting something playful drops low enough that a tired adult will actually start.
Across a whole childhood, I do not think a kid remembers the elaborately decorated cake. If decorating it brings you joy, that is valid in itself, and reason enough. But we all know the truer thing: kids remember how you made them feel. A mother who has woven small moments of enjoyment through her day feels different to be around.
I am a deeply curious person, and play is the main way I get to share that with my kids. Ultimately, all you have is your day-to-day happiness. Every step towards it is worth taking.
In motherhood we work so hard. We deserve some of the play we are so busy providing.
If the topic speaks to you, the book is The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play by Piera Gelardi. I read it in two evenings, which tells you something about how it is written. If you would rather listen first, her conversation with Debbie Millman on Design Matters is a good place to start.
Kate
Down-time: Unicorn Spaces: Redefining Down-time in Parenthood
Founder story: Control vs Creativity: How Studio Huske Started
For the self-preservation side of the same argument, read If in Doubt, Wash Your Hair.
Studio Huske designs durable, wipeable essentials for family life. Each mat is made in small batches in Korea using silicone leather certified to OEKO-TEX Standard 100/1 (Class I).
