When Glen and Jeff built their first Crooked House, it was because they knew one very important thing: Just telling your kids to "put down the dang joysticks and get outside" isn't good enough. You've got to give them something better to do if you want them to "engage in active play" (aka having fun). While it's tempting to make like Mark Twain and remember the good old days when you were a kid as a simple time when all a kid needed to have fun was a yard and an imagination, it was never really like that, and it's certainly not that way for kids today.

Even the cave kids had "toys" of one sort or another, often designed to train them in some useful skill, I'd imagine. Teaching kids to "play" was just another way of teaching them how to live. Especially now, where most of a kid's life is completely scripted and organized, it can be intimidating for a kid to have a world of possibilities in front of her without any idea how to use up that time.

What does "go play outside" actually mean?

My 6-year-old convinced me to go to a Daddy-daughter dance a couple months back and my little girl was paralyzed when we got there because not only did she have no idea what you were supposed to do at a "dance" in a middle school gym with bad Miley Cyrus music playing (she's got taste, my girl), but she had no idea how to dance in the first place. I was telling her to go dance with her friends and she was hanging onto my leg like it was the last life preserver on the Titanic.

Sure, she'd spazzed around in our living room a million times, but I think she was expecting the people at the organized dance to be all choreographed like the Backyardigans or something. So I had to do a little "modeling," as they say in education circles - showing her what you're supposed to do at one of these things. (Please note: I am a phenomenally bad dancer. This did not seem to matter.)

The same goes with playing outside, really. The other day my 6-year-old and I were over at the lake swimming when this idea just about struck me in the face it became so obvious. I was in the water encouraging her to just jump in, have fun with it, do some tricks, and she was standing there in her life jacket terrified to jump in.

Then I realized: She'd only ever seen us dive into the water. Was that what she was supposed to do?

So I got out of the water and showed her how to do a cannonball. And then a can-opener/jack-knife. And then a 360. With a grab.

I was having a blast - and she could tell.

Soon she was making up her own little moves, the best one being her "star jump," where she'd start singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and then jump off the raft spread-eagled right when she got to "star" in the song. All of a sudden, she didn't care if she got her face wet, or water up her nose, or did a bit of a belly flop.

In fact, she loved it so much I had to call it quits before she did. I was dead tired.

So, unless you want your kids out in the backyard Crooked House pretending to be "grumpy office worker who just got back from work and wants to sit on the couch and watch television," because that's all they've ever seen, maybe you should get out there and show them how this whole playing thing is done first.

Then you can go back inside and watch a little television...