You Don't Have to Be the Fun One

What toddlers — and babies — actually need from the logical adult in the room

Not every connection looks like rolling on the floor. Sometimes it looks like this — a real task, a willing child, and an adult who showed up for it. (Photo: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash)

The Voicemail

My brother Ed is a CEO. He is precise, logical, direct, and not — by his own matter-of-fact admission — the goo-goo-gah-gah type.

So when his wife had to fly to Arizona and left him to pick up his nearly two-year-old granddaughter for after school care, he did what any reasonable, highly competent person would do in an unfamiliar situation.

He called me and left a nervous voicemail.

The next day, I called him back. He was completely relaxed. Whatever I had expected — a report of survival, maybe, or a list of things he now understood about toddlers — what I got instead was a story about a pizza party.

He had set up a toddler tower in the kitchen. Bought Boboli crusts. Laid out toppings. His granddaughter — I'll call her Avery — stood at counter height and placed one pepperoni on the pizza. She looked up at him and announced, the way two-year-olds do with the full authority of someone who has just moved a mountain: "I did it!"

Ed told me what he said next, and I laughed out loud.

"Well, yes. You put one pepperoni down. But that's not the only thing you are good at."

He wasn't trying to be funny. He wasn't trying to be difficult. He was being — completely, authentically, without apology — himself. A man who does not dispense praise without basis. A man who, when I pressed him on the point he was making, said something I have been turning over ever since:

"I'm not providing support without conditions. It's not my role."

What He Did Right (Even When He Didn't Know He Was Doing It)

Here's the thing about the pizza party. It worked.

Not despite Ed's logical, structured, project-based approach to a two-year-old — but because of it. He created an environment with clear materials, an obvious task, no pressure, and no performance required of either of them. When Avery tried a pepperoni, said "no like it," and spit it out, Ed said simply: "That's okay. You don't have to eat it."

Five minutes later she was eating pepperoni slice after slice directly from the bag.

He didn't know he was practicing a clinical principle. He just did what felt respectful — which, as it turns out, is exactly what toddlers need. Autonomy preserved. Pressure absent. Curiosity allowed to move back in on its own terms.

Play doesn't have to look like rolling on the floor making animal sounds. Sometimes it looks like standing at a kitchen counter with toppings and a grandfather who will not tell you that you're wonderful just for showing up. Sometimes the most developmentally generous thing an adult can offer a toddler is a real task, real materials, and a real response.

Toddlers are not fooled by performed enthusiasm. They are, however, deeply responsive to genuine presence.

Ed was present. That was enough.

What He Did With the Baby

This past weekend I watched Ed interact with Avery's younger cousin — six months old, pre-verbal, communicating entirely through her body. Eye contact, head turns, kicking her "happy" feet that request more of an activity she likes, the quality of her stillness. She has no words yet, only the ancient, sophisticated, exhausting work of figuring out which humans are worth her attention and what kind of permanent memories she wants to make about them.

Robin — Ed's wife, a social worker with the natural warmth of someone who has spent her life reading people and meeting them exactly where they are — was kissing her, holding her, playing. She initiated a game of "boop," pressing her forehead gently to the baby's forehead, saying boop each time they made contact, then waiting. Watching. Reading the signal that said more and then reading the quieter signal, a few minutes later, that said done. She followed every cue without being told there were cues to follow.

Ed, for most of that evening, seemed barely aware the baby was in the room.

And then at one point I looked over and the baby was in his hands.

He wasn't performing. He wasn't initiating a game. He wasn't making sounds. He was just — looking at her. Studying her face with the same focused attention he brings to a balance sheet or a boardroom problem. Thirty seconds, maybe. Then he handed her, wordlessly, back to Robin.

I've thought about that moment more than I expected to.

He didn't know what to do with her. And he didn't pretend. He held her, he looked at her, and when he'd taken in what there was to take in, he handed her to someone who spoke her language more fluently. There was no failure in that. There was, actually, a kind of honesty that babies — who have extremely accurate nonsense detectors — probably appreciated more than he'll ever know.

He'll find his version of the pizza party with her too. It will just take a little longer. She needs to develop object permanence first. And maybe the ability to sort toppings.

The Part That's Not Optional

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because this blog would be doing you a disservice if it stopped at "and that's okay."

Play is not decorative in early childhood. It is not the fun part that happens after the important parts. It is the mechanism — the actual biological, neurological mechanism — through which language develops, cognition develops, emotional regulation develops, attachment develops. A child doesn't need every adult in their life to be a natural player. But every adult who is regularly present in a child's life needs a way in. Some entry point. Some version of the pizza party.

"I'm not the goo-goo-gah-gah type" is a personality. It is not an exit.

The grandfather who feels stiff at the playground, the uncle who is great at everything except this, the nanny who is competent and caring but not spontaneous, the parent who loves their child with everything they have and still feels like a tourist at the playmat — all of them have a version of the pizza party waiting. It might be building something. It might be a walk where you narrate what you see. It might be a sorting game with blocks or a cookie-baking project or thirty seconds of quietly studying a baby's face before handing her back.

It doesn't have to look like Robin's boop. It just has to be real.

Two Ways of Solving the Same Problem

Later that same weekend, my dad fell and split his forehead open on the way to the bathroom. In the scramble that followed — paper towels, pressure, an ambulance, stitches — I noticed something.

My niece Lydia, the 6-month old baby’s mother and Ed's daughter, is an extraordinary problem-solver. She'd entered my daughter Stella’s recent, unexplainable symptoms, the circumstances, the relevant details into an AI tool and asked it to think like a diagnostician. She had an answer in several minutes. It was a good answer.

The day after my dad's fall, Lydia was researching adaptive shoes that would prevent toe-catching in elderly walkers — the exact mechanical problem that had caused him to trip. And then I watched myself do something different.

While sitting next to my dad, I started asking him questions. Do you ever slap your feet when you walk? How often does it happen? What does it feel like right before your toe catches? We talked through what he'd noticed, what he thought might help, what felt manageable to him. By the end of the conversation he had three possible solutions — the shoes Lydia had found, a new railing, committing to the walker — and a sense that someone had thought about it with him rather than for him.

Neither approach was wrong. Lydia got to the answer faster. I took longer but ended up somewhere different — not just a solution, but a conversation my dad felt like a participant in.

I've been thinking about this distinction a lot lately, because it's exactly what I've been trying to build into LUMA — the AI parenting assistant I'm developing at RaisingHumans.ai. There are tools that will give you the best answer quickly, and they are genuinely useful. But LUMA is being built for a different kind of parent. The one who doesn't just want the answer. Who wants to think it through. Who wants someone who has read every book in the ‘Parenting Books & Resources’ section at the library, understands how your specific family fits into what those books say, and will sit with you while you figure out what actually applies.

Some of us want the library. Some of us want the librarian who has read every book and won't let us leave until we've found the right one.

(LUMA is coming soon at RaisingHumans.ai.)

Find Your Version of the Pizza Party

Ed figured out attachment theory on his own — not through instinct, but through analysis. He told me that Avery finally warmed to him at around 19 months, during a family trip to Brazil last November to meet her mother's side of the family. Surrounded by unfamiliar relatives she was meeting for the first time, he was suddenly one of the known ones. One of the safe ones. He came to that conclusion himself, which I found remarkable — because what he had stumbled onto, without knowing the clinical term for it, is exactly how toddler attachment works. She needed time, repetition, and enough accumulated evidence that he was consistent and trustworthy before she could let him in. He understood it the way he understands most things: by thinking it through until it made sense.

That's not a lesser path to connection. It's just a different one.

If you are the logical parent, the structured grandparent, the competent-but-not-spontaneous adult in the room — you are not failing the child in your life. You are not the wrong person for this. You are, in all likelihood, offering things the more expressive adults around you cannot: steadiness, honesty, a response that doesn't require the child to perform in order to receive it.

You just need to find your version of the pizza party. A real task. Real materials. Real presence. No performance required — from either of you.

And then show up for it.

That's the whole thing.

What does connection look like in your family — and who surprised you with their version of it? I'd love to know.

About the Author

Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with children and families. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and the creator of the Investigative Parenting methodology — a research-backed framework that guides parents to wonder before they worry, imagine before they interpret, and create before they catastrophize. Cindi holds a Certificate in the Foundations of Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a certified Parent Coach through the Parent Coaching Institute. She runs a direct-pay private practice in Northern Virginia and is the creator of LUMA, an AI-powered parenting assistant available at RaisingHumans.ai (coming soon!). Learn more about Cindi and Right Track Parenting at righttrackparenting.com.

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