Why Your Child Needs to Pretend
Why Your Child Needs to Pretend
Author: Dr. Anju Bhargava is a licensed psychologist at the National Center for Telehealth & Technology (T2).
As your older children head back to school this month, your younger ones have some very important learning of their own to do while their siblings are away. They need to play.
Encouraging children to play is an important task for caregivers and parents, because research shows that play contributes significantly to a child’s cognitive, emotional and social development . It is critical for parents to encourage play from a very young age; it’s particularly important during the preschool years (ages 2½ to 5). In fact, psychologists consider play as vital to a child’s cognitive development as food or sleep.
While cultural factors can influence the themes and types of play, all children should have an internal desire to play. Children learn by imagining and pretending (psychologists call this “pretend play”). Pretending provides an opportunity for children to not only act out their conflicts and fears, but to act out their aspirations as well.
Children pretend to be mommies, daddies, doctors, firemen or other social figures to explore social roles and cultural values, either by themselves or with playmates. This also contributes to language development, as children experiment with using different, more complex words and phrases to get what they want and need. A child can explore his toys or surroundings alone, or they can play with adults or other children. Play can be in organized playgroups or it can take place during the simplest daily tasks.
Having a variety of play environments increases the situations and roles that a toddler will experience. For instance, my nephews love to push the grocery cart at the store, take food cans off the shelf and put them in the cart, push the button on the elevator and remove dishes from the dishwasher. Allowing them to experience these different activities helps their development.
Play helps children understand social rules that can allow them to develop empathy, to learn to see from another person’s perspective. Skills like this help them connect to other children, learn to share, take turns and develop true peer relationships. For a preschooler who is trying to overcome his or her egocentric thinking, this is a lot of work.
One of the things that children learn as they get older is to delay gratification (i.e., getting what they want immediately). Acting out social roles during pretend play can help children learn how to behave appropriately in different situations.
For example, when one of my nephews was a toddler, he had temper tantrums as he struggled with learning that sometimes he had to wait for what he wanted. This was normal, primarily because as a toddler he did not yet have the words to express his frustrations. As he moved through his preschool years, he learned to regulate his emotions and express his frustrations in a more effective manner. As children learn these life skills, it increases their self-reliance.
So when your older kids come home from school and tell you what they learned in school, your younger child may have learned just as much as they did that day…by playing.
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