Play is essential to a child’s development, fostering growth at home, in school, and in social settings. Whether independent or interactive, play shapes social and emotional learning. My goal is to provide a brief introduction to content described in an article from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the impact of play on your child’s growth. The following categories of play are as described in the article and more thorough information can be found therein (Yogman et al., 2018, p. 3-4).
Object Play
Infants will engage with objects to learn about the world around them. This sensorimotor exploration transitions to where object play becomes symbolic to explore complicated ideas (i.e. pretending an item is a phone). Parents should provide infants opportunities to safely interact with different items to promote an understanding of their own senses and older children should be encouraged to engage with symbolic imaginative play to explore abstract concepts like communication and language.
Physical/Locomotor Play
Toddlers develop fine motor skills through physical forms of play and for older children this is a means to introduce vital social skills. Physical play can take the form of “roughhousing” with peers. While it should be reasonably monitored for safety, it is a good form of play to introduce light risk taking which builds resilience and develops several facets of emotional intelligence. Roughhousing introduces children to competition in a low stakes environment which in turn helps coping with losing easier moving forward.
Outdoor Play
Playing outdoors supports development of a child’s sensory skills and how they respond to diverse stimuli. Outdoor play has also become a modality closely focused on the socialization of children, particularly in one critical school environment: Recess. As participants in play children expand their understanding of the world and their social circles exponentially when play is no longer confined indoors. Recess gives children opportunities to approach peers and develop friendships all while enhancing academic growth and staying physically active.
Social/Pretend Play
This area of play focuses on the exploration of social structures and roles. Things like playing dress up and make believe are areas where children begin to understand more complicated social roles. They learn the process of negotiating rules with each other in social and imaginative ways. Both self-guided and adult-guided forms of social play facilitate children learning about themselves and important lessons from adults.
Play is foundational. It is how children communicate and learn. This post barely scratches the surface of everything play accomplishes. I highly encourage parents to review the article that inspired this post to fully understand the importance of play. Thank you for reading and I hope this exploration of play has piqued your interests.