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Grown-Up Play

Child development experts believe that the early years of life, particularly from birth through kindergarten or early elementary school, are the formative years that set up a child's future. Interactive play, especially between parents and children, but also between children and other important adults, contributes to healthy and robust development. The experience of playing together contributes to a child's personality and identity, to their emotional range and stability, to their coping and resilience, to their sense of self-worth, to their moral foundation, and to their capacity for intimacy, empathy, and relating.

Playing together with young children can take many forms. What is fundamental to the experience of play is being fully present with one another, responding back and forth, elaborating and shaping something together in a spontaneous and organically unfolding way that creates a shared experience unique to the participants.

In the course of back-and-forth play, young children can communicate and work through typical childhood concerns and curiosities, as well as exceptional traumatic experiences that are particular to them. They can grapple with dilemmas that may be interpersonal, moral, psychological, or internal. Through play, children can freely express their feelings, make meaning of their experiences, learn about who they are, find new ways to negotiate and sustain relationships, resolve conflicts, gain confidence, settle worries, and come to understand themselves and others.

Play provides children with the opportunity to adaptively work out worries, feelings, conflicts, and problems with an as-if, just-pretend, or what-if approach. In play, things can be elaborated in a way that is not actual, does not do any harm, and is reversible, and so enables children to express the full range of their feelings, wishes, and concerns.

In play, kids can experiment or explore things, trying out a variety of roles or situations, seeing what it might be like to be a different kind of person or to have a different set of feelings and reactions. They can find out how someone else might feel, and discover the impact of what they say or do with another person. They can practice self-assertion, emotional expression, empathy, competition, negotiation and compromise. This helps children to understand themselves and others as they relate "for real" in their daily lives.

According to experts, interactive play, especially between parents and babies or young children, is a cornerstone of the foundation that children need to flourish, to understand themselves and others, to reach their potential, and to experience their lives and relationships as meaningful. As children get older, back-and-forth play with other important adults can make a significant contribution to their development as well.

Playing with children can help them to become well-adjusted, resilient, competent, fulfilled, connected, and contributing adults. Interactive play paves the way for parents to build lifelong close and collaborative relationships with their children through the understanding, communication, attunement, and joy that comes with playing together.

Below are a few authors, articles, and books that contain some content related to the importance of interactive play between caregivers and young children. Click on the titles if you would like to link to the sources to read more. This list is by no means intended to include the full range of literature on these subjects, as there is much excellent writing and many thoughtful and expert authors who have written on these topics.
 
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