What are the benefits of play for your child?
The benefits of play for your child are too numerous to count. Play is a fundamental feature of how babies and children learn. You could also argue that play retains its efficacy as a tool for learning throughout adult life. It’s just that many of us tend to play less, and view play as less appropriate for us, when we become adults.
Humans are animals and throughout the animal kingdom we observe young animals playing with their siblings, their parents and sometimes with other youngsters or adults to whom they are not directly related. Focussing on mammals, we see play as a tool for learning that crops up again and again throughout different species. This implies that the roots of human play through infancy and childhood are at least in part the result of a common ancestry. Play has a purpose. It has a reason for being. And, the argument goes, learning is a significant part of that.
Play gives infants and children the opportunity to practice different things. Sometimes the practice is related to movement and spatial awareness. Sometimes it is connected to words and language. Sometimes it is about social interaction. And, particularly as babies grow and pass into early childhood, it is about all three of these things at the same time.
So play gives your child lots of chances to practice interacting with the world around them. This might vary from a baby picking up and then dropping blocks to a ten year-old child disassembling a car dashboard their parent retrieved for them from a scrapyard. It might vary from a baby babbling to their mother to a seven year-old child telling jokes to all the family at the dinner table. It might vary from a baby playing peek-a-boo with their father to a nine year-old child performing a dance routine for their extended family.
All these examples involve the child interacting with and exploring the world around them through play. The general nature of play remains the same as children age, but the content of play changes, reflecting the different points of development at which children find themselves. Babies and nine year-olds both play. They both use play as a way to engage with, explore and interact with the world around them. But the way in which they play, and the content of their play, varies.
When we talk about interacting with and exploring the external world, remember that this has many layers to it. The three most important layers are the physical, the social and the cultural.
Play that explores and engages with the physical world is concrete. For babies, that might mean picking things up, learning how to crawl, and jumping up and down. For an older child, that might mean playing football, running around or learning to play a musical instrument.
Play that explores the social world focuses on social interactions. For babies, this could be playing a call and response game with a parent, passing things to a parent then getting them back, or playing peek-a-boo with their grandma. For an older child, it might involve talking with a friend, playing a game of dragons and unicorns with their sibling, or organising a tea party for their teddies (even though this latter example sees a child playing on their own, they are using their teddies to mimic social interaction).
Finally, play that explores the cultural world focuses on language, signs and meaning. For babies, this could be playing a game based on responding to different words, playing a game that involves sorting things into different categories, or grouping items that are the same. For an older child, it might involve playing football and, as part of this, using the language of football to talk about things that happen (That’s a foul! What a pass!), making up a story and then pretending to live that story or taking on the role of a character such as a superhero.
As children get older, their play tends to encompass many different elements at once, so they end up exploring the physical world, the social world and the cultural world, or a combination of these, at the same time. But what we see time and again is that play affords children the opportunity, either on their own or with others, to practice, to engage with the world on different levels and, of course, to enjoy themselves while they are doing it. All of this aids learning. All of this promotes learning. And all of this helps your child to learn.
Mike Gershon is the author of over 40 books on teaching and learning, including many bestsellers. He is a former teacher who now works as a trainer, consultant and author. Over the years, Mike has worked with hundreds of schools in the UK and overseas, helping them to raise achievement and improve teaching and learning. He is the creator of some of the most popular teaching resources of all time, which have been viewed and downloaded more than 4 million times by teachers in over 180 countries and territories. Mike’s new course is designed specifically for parents. Help Your Child to Learn with Mike Gershon gives parents of 3-13 year-olds everything they need to support their children and help them to learn. Through a combination of videos, practical guides and bonus content, Mike presents parents with a complete solution to supporting their child, no matter what. Take a look today and explore the first section of the course for free, with no obligation.
