Make-Believe Play at Home
Hey, isn’t playing something children just do? Isn’t it part of the child DNA to know how to play? Well, children still play, but play itself is changing, and not for the better. Children play video games, watch TV, and engage in activities that are not what most adults over the age of 20 “played” when they were children. Gone are the long days spent playing with friends of different ages in the neighborhood, pretending to play school, having parties, being pirates or knights. Gone are the dressing up, making props, and playing out of favorite stories.
The term used for this high-level play with different roles, props, and storylines is “mature” make-believe play. Why is this kind of play—mature make-believe play—so important? In mature make-believe play children are more creative than when they are being entertained. They make up their own versions of stories; they create their own pretend ideas. They engage in symbolic thinking skills at a higher level than when watching television. Most important, there is growing research that mature make-believe play is related to the development of self-regulation. Self-regulation in turn is associated with increased levels of achievement in literacy and math.
It used to be that children learned these mature make-believe play skills from other children—“play mentors”—in the neighborhood. As play has become more focused on computers and television, children do not engage in these kinds of interactions anymore. And many children do not have older siblings who can teach them to play. More and more, children are spending time with children who are nearly the same age as they, and this diminishes the opportunities to learn more mature play skills.
Parents, however, can help children learn to engage in mature make-believe play by setting up the environment so that children can play, and becoming the child’s play partner and mentor. Here are some suggestions tied to the age of the child.