Keeping kids amused, educated, entertained, and calm is the ongoing task of any parent. It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to survive a rainy day indoors, or are on the road for a family vacation, or spending a dull afternoon at the doctor’s office—a deck of cards can be a parent’s best friend…
So much can be done with a deck of cards—all sorts of math and number play, as well as games, fortune-telling, and even trying to build the card house. I remember that my kids would even use the face cards to play impromptu imagination games and turn them into families and neighbors. For a few years, we actually had a pencil case with various mismatched decks and it was a well-used resource in the play room. I have to admit that in nearly twenty years of parenting, the deck of cards has never let me down.
If you really want to be ready for anything, find your family a copy of “Hoyle’s Modern Encyclopedia of Card Games”—it is a wonderful, fat paperback and you can almost always find it at thrift stores and used book stores or, of course, wherever you’d buy new books too. This book has the rules for hundreds of card games and you and your kids can discover all sorts of new adventures to be found with those 52 cards.
The other great thing about the deck of cards is that kids don’t outgrow it. My kids are all teenagers now and we still have the deck of cards handy to get through long waits, or long car rides. As your kids get older, their card games will just become more sophisticated. It is well worth keeping a good supply of cheap card decks on hand to pull out whenever the need or interest arises.
See Also: Keeping Kids Busy in the Car and on the Plane