The Jewish Mom Playing Her Way

Hi GOLDA gang, 

This weekend I got to see something unimaginably special: the bat mitzvah of the daughter of my sister’s oldest friend. I remember posting on Instagram when she was born, and it was completely wild to see her up there on the bimah, poised and confident, reading her Haftorah. 

At services yesterday, the rabbi said something that really struck me. While congratulating her on becoming a bat mitzvah, he pointed out that generations on both sides of her family had committed themselves to their Jewish identity. Had one person in one of those generations given up on it, she wouldn’t have been standing there on the bimah that morning, addressing her community for the first time as a Jewish adult. 

It feels like a profound thought for Mother’s Day, or “Matriarch Appreciation Day,” as Leandra Medine Cohen put it. 

It’s also the perfect day to feature my recent interview with Myriam Sandler of @mothercould, a kids activity and family lifestyle community (and the only parenting social media account I follow). Myriam is fabulous, and I’ll be in conversation with her this Tuesday on the Upper West Side to celebrate the launch of her new book, Playful by Design: Your Stress-Free Guide to Raising Confident, Creative Kids through Independent Play. I’d love to see you there. 

Myriam is full of tips and ideas for how to engage and empower kids, sharing easy play activities and educational tools using recycled household items. Plus, she assures us that we don’t need a million new toys or an entire playroom to keep our kids captivated. And she says sunscreen is the trick to get permanent marker off walls—she really has us covered. 

Here’s my conversation with Myriam Sandler. Stick around to the end for a giveaway of Playful by Design and some fun Mother’s Day news!

Let's start at the beginning, how did Mothercould come to be?

I have three girls: a ten-year-old, a seven-year-old, and a three-year-old. When my oldest daughter was a baby, she wouldn’t eat any solids. She was in the 90th percentile for height and weight, so when I turned to my doctor, she said her numbers were good so everything was fine. And I was like, but she doesn't eat! 

I noticed that she had a texture sensitivity. We live in Miami, and every time we would go to the beach and sit her on the sand or on the grass, she would always curl up her feet and cry. So I put two and two together: It wasn't that she didn't like the taste of the food—it was that she wasn't comfortable with the textures. 

I started incorporating a lot of sensory play into our lives. I created sensory play recipes that were edible so she would get comfortable with different textures in a play setting and then I could bring that to the dinner table. Within six months, she went from eating nothing to eating everything: quinoa, salmon, broccoli, all the things we think kids will never eat. 

I took that Mother Could moment and brought it to social media. 

Things really took off in 2019, after I had my second daughter. I loved the Tasty videos, which were overhead shots of hands making different recipes, and I brought that to play. I started making videos like that as I created play-doh, sand and all of these play recipes I had developed over the years. 

This started with you solving a problem yourself when the professionals weren’t exactly willing to jump in and help you. When did you realize that what you were doing online was really speaking to other people? 

It wasn't the amount of followers, it was the conversations that I was having with people—the actual connections with people who were going through maybe not the same thing but similar things. Maybe it wasn’t food-related. Maybe it was growth. Maybe it was crawling. It was all different types of concerns that we have as parents. 

Being able to share on a platform with people who weren’t judging me, who were understanding and just kind of listening, and I was listening to them—that was when I was like, “Okay, this is something big.” 

I don’t call them followers. They’re our Mothercould community members. They're here because we're all searching for the same thing. And it’s grown a lot over the years.

Your children have also grown, and I’m curious how you change what you’re doing and your approach as your children get older. 

I've noticed that even though I don't have a big, pressing problem, as parents we all go through similar situations—whether our kids are sick, or don't want to sleep, or don't play enough, or just need an outfit for a cousin's wedding. There's so many things that happen to literally all of us, and sharing my life openly and honestly has brought me closer to my community. It's always a day in the life of a mother with three kids.

As a family, we travel a lot, which I know can be daunting for a lot of families. So showing all of it—my three kids getting on a flight, activities they can do on the plane, or in that particular city. It isn't directly correlated with sensory play, but it is helpful in parenting. It’s giving you the confidence of “Hey, you can do it. Set yourself up for success, and it'll be wonderful.”

Since you mentioned travel, I have to ask about your most recent trip, which was for Passover. I was mesmerized by the whole thing, so tell us about that trip and a bit about your and your husband's backgrounds. 

I'm from Venezuela, and my husband's family is from Mexico. We both come from very large Jewish families. My side of the family, we get together for Rosh Hashanah. And Marcos’s side of the family gets together for Passover. Marcos's grandmother is the pillar of their family—there are 72 Sandlers—and Passover is her holiday. She has six children and while five of them are still in Mexico, their children are all over the place. So his grandmother gets everybody back to Monterrey for Passover, and we’re all at one giant table of 50-plus seats.

His family is very creative, and on the first night of Passover they do a show for the children. They go through the whole story of Passover, and the children are so engaged. Children learn best through play, which is one of the big reasons why I wrote Playful by Design. The fact that his family does this show at the beginning of the Seder puts less pressure on the kids to listen and sit still during the actual Seder. 

Watching your videos from that trip, and thinking about your emphasis on independent play, I found myself wondering whether growing up in a big family—a Jewish family, a South American family—influenced your approach. Is there something about these environments that you and your husband grew up in that made you creatively open to the idea of having to take ownership of your own space in a family?

I think one of the things that has taught Marcos and me a lot of what we do today is having developed those problem solving skills early on. When you are part of a bigger family, there's not so much attention brought onto those smaller problems. Society has taught us that our children are not allowed to be bored, but boredom is what sparks creativity and will ultimately lead to independent play. 

Growing up in a big family, our lives weren't perfectly planned. It was like, “Go play.” And now during Passover, when we're all with the extended great-grandkids, they were just playing the entire time. They figured it out. 

Having all of that scheduled time for children can be actually pretty hindering. We think we're doing the best for our kids, which, again, depends on the family. If your family's goal is for your child to be a tennis star, then maybe they do need to go to tennis 15 million hours a week. But if your goal as a family is to have more independent play and for kids to play more in general, then it's freeing up that space. I think in my childhood, and in Marcos’s childhood, we had space: We had space to be ourselves, we had space to create, and we had space to be with each other if we wanted to, which we did. We're both very close to all of our family members.

How did you know there was a book here? And how do you bring what you do, which is so much about videos and visuals, into a print format? 

When I first started on Instagram, I would share a lot of playroom rotation videos. My approach is to store three-fourths of your toys and only display a fourth of them. And then once a month I would literally change out what was being displayed. My kids thought it was Hanukkah all over again, and I didn't spend a single dollar. So I would share this on social media, and at first it was amazing. I was able to answer questions, but as my Instagram community grew, I no longer had the time to answer all of the particular questions:

What if I don't have enough storage? What if I'm in a one-bedroom apartment? What if I have a baby and a 10-year-old? What if? What if? 

I felt like I was doing my community a disservice by not being able to answer their particular questions. I knew I needed to actually write down all of these scenarios. Playful by Design has one chapter on playrooms, and all the other chapters focus on different areas of the home that could be play hotspots. I wanted it to be much greater than my family and my circumstance. My approach is always “ask yourself this, this, and this, and whatever your answer is, let's apply that in a smart way into your space so that it is perfectly tailored for you and your family.” 

And we did it with Playful by Design. It took a while. I had several question boxes that I would put up on my Instagram stories, and I collected all that data, and I answered everyone's questions, and I put it in a really easy-to-use resource that readers can come back to over and over again as their family dynamic changes. Today you have one child, tomorrow you have three children—and age gaps and genders and moving. There's so many different things that happen with every family, and we put it all in. 

And the best part about writing a book is that you get to go on a book tour. I imagine it’s going to be really special to connect with this community, many of whom you have only interacted with online, or who have come to know you as sort of this figure on their screens. 

I think I wrote the book to go on a book tour. I have always wanted to connect in person with my online community, because I do feel like I have a personal relationship with a lot of our community members. I've seen their pictures. I know their families. When I see them in real life, I'm going to be like, show me your little Instagram picture, because we've been chatting for years. That's really special to me.

Can you leave our GOLDA readers with something that surprised you along the way on your Mothercould journey? 

I think my realization is that no matter where you are in the world, whether you're in India or Australia or Miami or New York, wherever you are, and no matter what your socioeconomic background is or your religion or what you look like, at the end of the day we are way more connected than we think we are. We all understand each other. We are all in the same boat no matter where we are. 

I’m so excited to keep talking to Myriam on Tuesday, this time on stage at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan. Tickets include a copy of Playful By Design, which Myriam will be signing. Hope to see you there! 

Also, in the Mother’s Day spirit, some exciting news: I’m pregnant! Edith’s little sister will be arriving this summer. We’re putting together a special series all about pregnancy through a jewish lens, in partnership with our friends at Hatch. Stay tuned for features on Jewish baby naming traditions, superstitions, IVF and infertility, and much more. I can’t wait to bring you along on this journey with me. 

Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie