Importance of Play in Children's Lives and Five Reasons Some Parents Struggle Playing with Kids

"Play is the work of childhood" - Jean Piaget

Role play, learning through play, attachment play, therapeutic play and so on are all the buzz these days. We hear and read about it, but at the end of the day most people still have a hard time truly playing with their children or underestimate the impact of genuine play upon a child's development.

Play is the most valuable way that children learn. It allows them to use their creativity while simultaneously developing their imagination, as well as physical, cognitive, and emotional skillsets. Play is crucial to healthy brain development, social, and emotional development. Through play our kids grow their fine and gross motor skills, learn about boundaries, both physical and emotional, different preferences, taking turns, teamwork, and competition. Role playing can help cope with emotional trauma and anxieties. Children negotiate with different personalities and feelings that come with winning and losing. They learn to share, wait, be patient, and stand up for themselves. Rough and tumble play helps a lot of frustration and alarm to come out without repercussion, and attachment play helps us bond, strengthen our connection, and allows them to feel safe.

So at the end of the day, understanding the benefits of play, we know it's important to play with our kids, but some parents still struggle, and others notice that their kids struggle themselves and instead of engaging in true play, they end up being passive consumers of cartoons, video games, and similar types of entertainment. True play has become endangered in many ways, and if you find yourself struggling, here is a few reasons why it might be the case:

1. Lack of understanding. Many parents feel helpless because they buy all the new toys on the market, yet their children are only interested in those for a few minutes, and then complain about feeling bored, ask for parent to play or simply ask for cartoons. In this case the problem is lack of understanding that it's up to parents to help a child to learn how to actually PLAY, Just as kids aren't born with an ability to operate a fork and knife, they also don't know how those "tools" in front of them can be used. If you buy your child a new car and simply give it to them it's one thing. But if you immediately start making "brrrrm brrrrm" sounds, driving it around, "pumping gas", start a race and so on, that's quite a different story. Kids need our help and example to see what else can be done with toys rather than looking at them and tossing them around. If help doesn't come, many kids have a hard time getting into true play, and at the end of the day with creative thinking, resulting in choosing simple pret-a-porte entertainments such as cartoons, video games etc.

2. Other parents have a hard time because they feel like they just can't play, come up with a good role play. Basically, they feel like they aren't creative enough and constantly judge themselves and their own efforts. Here is the funny thing: in order to play, we need to put on our creative thinking hat, and it's not that hard, even if you think that you aren't a creative person at all, but when we feel stressed, it's simply impossible. We need to feel relaxed to get creative and go with the flow.

---Try to look at yourself with your child's eyes.---

They are happy when you spend time with them, and they don't judge every single action that you take, they are just happy you are present and spending time with them. Not every play will turn out perfect, but that's not the goal, ultimately the goal is spending quality time with your little humans!

3. In our day and age, plenty of parents feel like they are wasting time playing, and prefer reading to kids or engaging in some sort of "developmental activities". The same Jean Piaget I quoted in the beginning of this article also said that the goal of education is "not to increase the amount of knowledge, but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things". He said this phrase decades ago, yet it's more and more applicable in our day and age. With the growth of artificial intelligence, automatization, and robotics, what truly matters is not our ability to solve problems, which even though complex, can be solved by computers quicker and more efficiently, and not memorizing things. It's our ability to solve problems creatively that is our differentiator, and that's the biggest thing we can learn through play - creative, divergent thinking. So when you think you are wasting time playing with your kids, think again.

4. Some parents struggle because they don't have a basic understanding of developmental psychology. E.g., you cannot play with a 1-2 year old the same way you would play with a 5 year old, and if you try, everyone ends up disappointed. For most people it is intuitive, but some people struggle with this. For example, before 3 children don't play with other children, at most they engage in what is called parallel play playing next to each other, but not with each other, and if we try and push them to "play together", it's not going to work. At age 2.5 - 3 kids start to role play, but still don't understand what actions they can do with their "character" and if we don't show them or they don't get some ideas elsewhere, the play will end quickly, yet when we do give them a few examples, play will only blossom.

5. Parents who have a specific agenda. Maybe you were in love with Harry Potter as a teen and now you think think the same will happen to your daughter, or you had a dream of becoming a doctor and it never happened, so now you keep getting new doctor sets for your son even though he doesn't seem interested. Here is the thing: kids aren't our extension, they have their own personalities, ideas, wants, and likes, and often enough they differ from ours, If you keep pushing that doctor set on a boy who will only play transformers, don't expect the play to be fun for anyone. Moreover, even if your child would be interested in this subject in general, but your agenda is too strong and they are in their counter will stage (anywhere between 2 and 5, but it can happen at different stages depending on different factors and circumstances), they will push back. Kids are the best at finding our buttons and pushing them, and the best guidance here is going with the flow and accepting your little humans the way they are, and following their interests and ideas rather than your own.

Bottomline? You know playing with your kids is important. Moreover, playfulness is correlated with emotional health and well being, and being able to be playful with yourself and others shows that you have a strong connection with your own inner child. Find your way to your playfulness, and find find a way to share it with your little humans. One day they will say thank you, if not verbally, then through your connection and relationship.