1KHO 907: Play Is An Emotional Release Valve | Tamara Neufeld Strijak, Reclaiming Our Students

**Ginny Yurich** (0:01)
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I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And what a treat to have Tamara Neufeld-Stryjak here today with us. She is doing incredible things in the world, mainly focused on connection, on reconnecting our soul to the arts and connecting to each other and living hands on. She has a phenomenal book called Reclaiming Our Students, Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever and What We Can Do About It. She has this place called The Cottage and is helping to bring people together around the arts and mute poetry, music, writing workshops, movement. Tamara, welcome.

**Tamara Neufeld Strijack** (1:35)
Thank you. Happy to be here.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:38)
I am thrilled to have a chance to talk with you. I love how the things that you do are so practical. And I read your dad's book, Gordon. He has a book called Hold On To Our Kids. I actually, I only read it earlier this year and it was just so life changing to me. I learned about collecting, I learned about tears of futility.
I just have learned so much from the two of you. So I am grateful to get this time with you. I would love if you could kick us off with talking about where the cottage, this yellow door, where it entered into the story. So you are helping teachers, mainly teachers in the book reclaiming our students, but also if you read it, it's going to help you as a parent as well. You're doing all this work with the Neufeld Institute.
At what point, or maybe it was all along, did you decide or determine, I need to put this in a practice. And so you have this cottage in actual physical space and then you're also helping people doing this to an online program called Play Into Practice. It's like, it's not just theoretical. It's like, here's how you actually do it.

**Tamara Neufeld Strijack** (2:43)
Yes. Well, and the seeds of it, I think, were planted probably as many as eight to ten years ago. Just the little seeds, you know, that there's got to be a different way of doing things. You know, I've had a very, very full life and sometimes very busy, sometimes not a lot of space to make room for these these really important.
Well, let me put it, let me put it in another way.
When you get so busy and you're in scheduled activities and you're doing all these things, that many of them are so important, you know, it's not that they're not important, but there hasn't been any time to slow down, to slow down and create space for something that is so, so magical, you know, when you can create space for these things in our life that were always part of our life, but we've kind of squeezed them out. We've squeezed them out, and especially, I think particularly Ginny, where I noticed the screens were starting to fill all of that extra, all of those little spaces, that we started to lose track of what was really important and what we needed. And when I started teaching and training educators and also counselors in child development, it was really a big focus on how do we put this into practice? How do we take this theory of this developmental theory of what children need? And how do we put it, how do we bring it into real life here? What does that look like? And so the seeds of the Yellow Door was planted when I sort of started seeing the need to do something a little bit differently and love my work with the Neufeld Institute. It's been amazing to see so many lives change by just coming from a developmental approach, which should be kind of common, should be common. It should be should be there right at the fore, but it's not presently in our world. We have different focus and different priorities. So that's where the seeds were planted and gradually just moving towards starting to bring that more into the world. When I partnered with Hanna Beach with Reclaiming Our Students, that was a big part of it too. She just naturally brings so much play into whatever she does. And so that was also just a great way to go, yes, this is important. Yes, we need to talk about this.