Teach Your Kids to Roughhouse in ‘Slow-Mo Mode’

The kids, they’re gonna wrestle. If you’ve got a child — and especially if you have more than one child — you’ve probably noticed their propensity for extremely physical play. Maybe you’ve even roughhoused with them yourself — it can be fun! But now that we’re 72 years into this pandemic and staring down a long, dark, cold winter (sorry, it’s coming), you might be a little over all that bouncing-off-the-walls-and-into-each-other commotion. The solution to this problem comes, of course, from Reddit.

Reddit user u/ITWrksSalem explains:

My kids (boys 6, 3) are wild animals. They constantly ask me if we can roughhouse (they got it from gma) I was exhausted yesterday and just blurted out “can we please just try some calm-housing for once?”

They both found this gut-bustingly hilarious and agreed to give it a try.

Calm-housing is just like wrestling except slower, gentler, and quieter. In practice it basically amounts to my boys laying on the ground hugging each other while they whisper jokes into each others ears.

I liked this idea, but u/sleepyheadp quickly chimed in with a slightly different framing of the same concept that I think kids will like even more: Slow-motion wrestling:

Recommend slow-mo mode. Basically all the same moves in roughhousing but they gotta do it slow motion like the cool parts of a movie.

I tested this theory out on my 10-year-old son who, unsurprisingly, enjoys a little wrestling from time to time, particularly with his friends. The problem lately has been that they like to wrestle each other during the weekly mini-tutoring session we set up for him and three of his buddies to complement their virtual classwork. They want to wrestle; Ms. Beth wants them to calm down and practice Spanish.

My son claims he’s never the instigator of the wrestling, but as the biggest and strongest member of the group, he is the most likely to do some real damage. And, look, if you come at him, he’s gonna come back; that’s just the reality we’re living in.

“I think I have a solution to your wrestling problem,” I told him this morning.

“I’m listening,” he responded.

I described it to him, and then we tried it out, and it is hilarious and fun. So now he and his friends can “wrestle” between Spanish lessons without totally annoying poor Ms. Beth, and that es bueno.