Why play is important for your child's mental development

Reading time: 2 minutes On the one hand, we hear again and again today that playing is important for the intellectual development of our children. On the other hand, even kindergarten children are already with a busy schedule "blessed." However, this can have negative consequences. Learn more about it here.

Why play is important for your child’s mental development

Game researchers have released a study that says children up to the age of 6 should play 15,000 hours to develop healthily. That’s the equivalent of 7-8 hours a day – an adult’s workday.

Playing is therefore extremely important for the development of children. It helps them develop the skills and abilities they urgently need for their school career and adulthood. Because in the game children deal with different things and learn to learn their environment and the demands and rules placed on them.

To play and learn – because playing is learning – they need many different stimuli. You must be able to smell, hear, feel, see and experience. We can show the children in books what a rabbit is. But this picture book rabbit will always remain abstract if the child is never allowed to pet, smell and feed a real rabbit. Children have to train all their senses and use them to play in order to live and learn optimally.

Playing is important for development because it supports a wide variety of areas

Regular play promotes different areas that train vital skills that children will need later in life.

emotional skills: recognizing oneself and others; processing feelings and recognizing the feelings of the other person; higher frustration threshold; Problem-solving strategies; Solving strategies; stronger resilience; lower aggression threshold; a reasonable handling of anger, sadness, anger, joy.
cognitive skills: better, more logical thinking; greater understanding of language; higher ability to concentrate; recognizing numbers, colors, shapes.
social skills: better listening, sense of responsibility, willingness to cooperate, willingness to help; no premature judgment and assessment of others; reasonable treatment of others.
motor skills: faster responsiveness; Improved gross and fine motor skills, balance, coordination of your own body.

Playing is important for your child’s development, as it gives them the freedom to gain their own experience

Children learn from the things they are allowed to do, touch, smell, break. You don’t learn anything by telling them. Let your children have as many of their own experiences as possible. Touch the leaves, crawl through the forest, stir the dough, paint on the pane with your finger, discover yourself in the mirror, throw sand at yourself, eat sand. Yes, eat sand: children explore in a certain Age their environment with the Mouth and this time is important. They have no option but to explore the world with their hands and mouth and a little bit of sand won’t hurt their child.

Playing offers these freedoms for your Child and therefore playing is important for mental development. Give your child as few solutions as possible and let your child have their own experiences. Give him the opportunity to find a solution to his problem himself – even if it protests loudly. This is the only way for the brain to build up a large network and this is the only way for your child to develop self-confidence, tolerance for frustration and problem-solving skills.

It will be grateful at school at the latest if it has already acquired these skills. It has been proven that children with a low level of frustration do not expand them in old age. If parents take everything away from their children to save them from frustration, anger, anger and disappointment, none of this will be available to the child as an adult in the best possible way.

Photo credit: Daria Filiminova / stock.adobe.com