Never stop your child from playing

  

Date Posted: 3/14/2012 6:13:57 AM

Posted By: sashoo  Membership Level: Silver  Total Points: 382

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Play is an important factor in the development of your child in a healthy. Play is so important to a child in the following ways:

1. It helps them to understand and practice communication skills by negotiating roles and appreciating the feelings of others. It helps the child''s language development. The repetitiveness of the words that they use during play enhances their language skills.

2. It helps them to respond to their peer''s feelings during the play, as they wait for their turn. It also helps them to share materials and experiences.

3. It enables them to experience others'' points of view by working through conflicts about space, materials or rules in a positive manner.

4. It helps them to experiment with the role of the people in their home, school, community. They also come into contact with the needs and wishes of others and may start appreciating the difference that lies in them.

5. It enables them to express feelings. This is more evident in pretense play, where children express their feelings. This enables them to learn how to start controlling their emotional expressions.

6. Play is important for healthy brain development. Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master. This helps them to conquer their fears.

7. Play with parents helps children to develop superior social skills, even as they learn a lot through playing with parents. Parents should not see it as a waste of time when they play with their children.

8. It stimulates the child''s creativity. For instance playing with clay and making various things like clay houses, clay vehicles, paper vehicles, paper dolls and of course, the list is endless.

9. Play builds self esteem. Children will in most cases play at something they know they can do well, at which they can therefore be successful.

10. Play enables

a young child to be in charge. In their everyday lives, children are small and powerless, with someone always telling them what to do and how to do it. The reverse of this happens when they play, they take over everything - they are not told what to do and how to do it.

11. Play allows children to grow beyond their years. They can be a doctor, a mother, a father, a teacher and anything else in their pretense play.

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