In recent years, the importance of pretend play to children’s development has been emphasized by many early-childhood educator and professors.
For instance, Marygrace Taylor claims that pretend play could not only foster children’s creativity, curiosity, but also many life skills such as self-control skills, developing interpersonal relationships with others, expressing difficult emotions, language and communication skills.
Similarly, Scholastic Parents concludes that pretend play could help develop children’s various skills and abilities, including language skills, social and emotional skills, thinking skills and imaginative skills.
What’s more, Marisa Lascala argues that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been making families spend more time at home with children. This long-term staying at home has made children and teachers find a common refrain that children want to play pretend all the time.
Kibtoy, as a professional and experienced toy dealer, understands the essential role of pretend play so many great toys are selected to sell in our online shop www.kibtoy.com. In this article, let’s discuss the importance of pretend play for children’s physical and mental development, including what pretend play is, then its important roles and what toys could be used for pretend play.
In this article, Kibtoy intends to discuss what pretend play is and its benefits for children's development and growth. Besides, some great toys are recommended for pretend play.
Pretend play is also termed as imaginative play because much imagination is involved during the whole process.
Parents, teachers and educational researcher have noticed that children learn new things by imagining and practicing more than merely listening to others like adults do.
For instance, it’s common to see a boy holding a stick and pretending to be a magician or wizard with a magic wand. Besides, his friends would be happy to join in his imagined adventure.
During pretend play, children will use simple objects, such as a bag, a toy car or even a piece of paper to represent something else. Then, lots of imagination will come out their minds.
What’s more, their friends around them would like to believe and happily join in the process of imagination. A story with many interesting and vivid plots will be developed by participants. Everybody will create and share the story.
However, pretend play will usually go beyond mere imagination of stories like this. It’s more common to see that children playing different social roles in pretend play.
In this make-believe game, children would use some objects to dress themselves up, such as putting on a cap before going out to work.
When playing imaginary roles in pretend play, children begin their social exploration and learn many things better than they’re told by adults because they gain some firsthand life experience although it’s not as complete as in reality.
To conclude, much imagination is involved in pretend play. Children use their imagination to project social roles into themselves so that they could live as these roles for a while.
Therefore, pretend play could make children to imagine, socialize, communicate, empathize, create and more.
The process of pretend play could help children build up skills and abilities in many important developmental areas. Four of them are concluded as below.
First, pretend play could enhance children’s language skills. When children engage themselves in an imaginary play with their pals, they will definitely use words or phrases to explain their imagination, intention and required cooperation from others.
Since they use some objects to represent something else, they have to explain to their pals what those things are and what they want. In addition, they will imitate to talk in the same way the social role they’re playing.
Anyway, children are good at imitating adults’ language. Meanwhile, their friends will reflect and react to the story in order to make it go on.
Then they can have more fun from the play. Therefore, we could conclude that pretend play is an interactive process of communication, which could be considered as a great opportunity for children to practice spoken languages.
Second, pretend play could cultivate children’s imagination which will facilitate the development of their creativity in future. During pretend play, they use a few simple objects to represent things in an imagined world.
For instance, they will pretend to be a car driver who is involved in an accident just in the scene of this car adventure toys playset. Sometimes, children will use an object to represent a thing that share no similarity at all.
For example, they will use a toy car to represent a huge mountain. Suppose children don’t have much imagination in the play, they will feel bored with it.
Imagination enables them to keep the story go on as they want. When they grow up, their imagination will benefit them in figuring out new things or solutions before anybody else.
Third, pretend play could build up children’s social skills so that they could enjoy good relationships with others. Although pretend play means having imaginative or dramatic experience in their mind, children will fully engage themselves in it because they enjoy the playing time with their friends.
When the play become an interactive process, children will come across some problems about how to get along with others, such as taking turns, listening to others, sharing responsibilities, mind-storming and so on.
Particularly, they will develop empathy which allows them to think from different perspectives. In other words, they will understand how to think in other people’s way because they have the experiences of “walking in someone else’s shoes” in two ways.
On one hand, they will stand on the shoe of the roles whom they are playing. For instance, they will try to imitate how a doctor will talk to a patient, which could make them think in a doctor’s way.
In reality, they will understand why a doctor will ask them some questions when they see a doctor next time. On the other hand, they will stand on the shoes of other participants in the pretend play.
When participating pretend play, children will speak out their feelings and ideas. Communication will make other children try to understand what other people think and feel.
Therefore, children in pretend play could develop empathy in two ways, which will facilitate their social skills and develop good relationship with others.
Fourth, pretend play has been found to build up children’s problem-solving abilities. First of all, pretend play is a kind of group activities shared with others, which means a lot of interaction is involved in its process.
Then, many problems, including conflicts will take place. For instance, children will discuss the turn to try different roles or the choice of different materials in the playhouse.
Many possible reactions to these problems will be generated, such as brainstorming, compromise, negotiation, cooperation, giving up and taking turns. All these reactions could become problem-solving skills for children.
When they encounter similar problems in their future life, these skills could help them.
To conclude, pretend play is very important for children’s growth and development. When children use simple objects to represent something else, they would come into a wonderful imagined world with their friends.
Pretend play could be seen as a process full with communication which could become life experience for children and build up their social and cognitive skills and abilities.
