Need to bone up on the finer points of peek-a-boo? Want to take vroom-vrooming Hot Wheels to the next level? Yeah, me neither. Which is why I recently passed up a free seminar with Stevanne Auerbach, aka: Dr. Toy. (Is her Ph.D. in fun?)

Auerbach’s book "Smart Play/Smart Toys" and her seminars on how to play with kids aim to boost your child’s PQ, that’s Play Quotient, and teach you to teach them how to play … better. I knew my foolish girls weren’t feeding and burping dolls to their fullest potential!

Though I can’t distinguish a PQ from a BM, I did like Dr. Toy’s list of recommended play things (Click with caution – some links are PDFs). It made shopping for a 10-year-old boy – a species I know nothing about – less painful. Auerbach has even been named 2007’s “The Wonder Woman of Toys.”

But recommending toys is quite different than offering to teach parents how to teach their kids how to play with them. There's something so intrusive about that idea -- another expert chipping away at parents' confidence in their abilities to, oh, properly maneuver a plastic gingerbreadkid around the Candyland board? Play catch? Make cookies from playdough?

Does everything have to be optimized for our children? Do we parents have to intellectualize everything related to our kids? Do we have to really be so involved, so trained, so workshopped? Isn't it OK to fail or under-perform or just do a half-assed job, I don't know, 25 percent of the time? Won't our kids be more interesting in the long run? No, not your baby? Fine.

You know, as long as we’re teaching kids what parents have mistakenly believed comes naturally, like playing, I’d like to plug my own upcoming workshop: “Get your kids to eat dessert and leave them begging for more.”