If you ever find yourself wanting to connect with your child, to understand them better, or to feel more liked and appreciated by them, I have one simple piece of advice: play with your child. Something I have consistently observed whilst working with families is that children tend to gravitate towards the parent that plays with them the most. To many parents this may be felt as favouritism. Your child always seems to want one particular parent more. As much as this might feel like favouritism, my personal take on it, is that it is much less to do with liking a particular parent more, rather it has everything to do with communicating with another parent more in the language that children best understand-Play.

Some species of animal are born ready to go straight off into the world, their parents have already left them as eggs and they are on their own. There is already an innate natural ability to simply be the animal they are straight away. Humans are not like that. Similar to lions, tigers, bears, elephants and many other animals, human babies stay with their parents and learn everything they need to know from them and the close communities they grow up in. Babies are vulnerable, completely dependant and need to learn to survive.

There are many ways children learn. Arguably, one of the most influential ways is play. I love watching David Attenborough documentaries and seeing the lion cubs play fighting with each other, one gets a bit too rough and mama lion steps in to tell them off. I love it because I can envision the exact words she shouts at them as if she were my own mother when I was a kid with my brother- “HEY! Stop winding each other up!”. To me and my brother of course, deep in the world of play, the hitting was necessary, he was an evil person that just broke out of jail and I was the policeman trying to put him away back behind bars. We were simply playing and mum provided us with a snap back into reality where we learned the boundaries of play and consequences of our actions. She was a mediator between the play world and the real world, letting us understand when we have gone too far.

Now if parents can teach their children a lot outside of the play world, just imagine what interesting things you can teach your children from WITHIN the play world…

This realm is the realm of kids. It’s where they communicate the best, it’s where they test out ideas and practise fake scenarios. It’s essentially where they flourish. The more you enter this world with them the more comfortable they feel with you as you communicate in a way that’s familiar, so how can you enter this world?

Be Brave

Entering the world of play means selectively ignoring reality for a bit and submerging yourself into whatever character or crazy scenario or repetitive actions your child is doing. Some of these may look weird. It might be embarrassing to pretend to be a princess and sip tea from a pretend cup, then fly around the house on a magical pretend pony. I get it. But the second you let your self consciousness and self doubt go, be brave, be confident and properly become some the characters you will begin so see a new deeper level of communication open up with your child.

Match The Style of Play Your Kid Chooses

Depending on your child’s developmental level they will engage in different types of play. When a child is younger, their play is more sensory based. Touching things, tasting, making and creating. Think sandpit, play dough, tickling and peek-a-boo. As children begin to develop they generally start using toys or other objects to play out scenarios. Things suddenly have characters and names and can interact with each other. Teddy can feel hungry and need bedtime and the baby doll might be a naughty baby that keeps crying. Eventually children move into role-play based play, where they actually act out and become the characters themselves. Instead of ‘Daddy’ being a Teddy bear it is actually your child that takes on the role of ‘Daddy’. It’s important not to overstep by picking your own preferred style of play. If your child wants to play police cars with the toy trucks and you get up and start running around role playing a police car then there is a disconnect between the way the child is playing and the way you are playing. The same goes if they want to role-play Kings and Queens and instead you bring out play dough. To really benefit from the connection you have to be willing to join the child in whatever play they are trying to engage in.

Let Them Lead and You Follow

The kids are the experts of play. If you’re feeling a little nervous and unsure how to interact, simply let your child take the reins and show you! Mirroring is essential and covers all aspects from the actual movements of play to the energy the child is displaying, to the facial expressions. If your kids is excitedly grabbing an orange from the fruit bowl and pretending it’s a baby, you could go excitedly grab an apple and do the same! I know it all seems a bit weird sometimes but remarkably this is how kids learn and it is an incredible feeling to join in with their learning process.

I cannot recommend joining in the world of play enough and the only way to really understand the benefits is to simply try it out for yourselves. So let loose, get imaginative and go play!

Written By Nanny Emmy

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or topics you would like us to discuss in future blogs please do send an email to nannyemmyquestions@gmail.com