- In this video, you're gonna learn all about
different types of play and why each of these types of play
is crucial for our children.
Stick with me until the end
so I can share a resource with you where you can start
to reclaim these types of play in your own home
and watch your children flourish and thrive.
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I drop a new episode on Mondays.
The Parenting Junkie.
Hi, I'm Avital.
I'm a mindful parenting coach.
I'm the mother of four and I've been truly blessed
to be helping thousands of parents doing what I love most,
talking about presence, peace and play.
In today's video, I'm gonna outline for you
exactly the importance of independent play
and the types of play that you wanna make sure
your child is getting.
So if you're ready to jump in,
hit that like button and let's get going.
Number one, developing skills.
Children develop skills through play.
We often in our culture tragically think
that there is work, meaningful work, and then there is play,
and play is what you do when you're done with all your work.
And this is such a deep misunderstanding
of how children learn, of how they develop skills.
Let me ask you something:
have you ever seen a baby learn to walk?
Let me know if the comments below
if you've witnessed a baby learning to walk.
Did they need to be told to learn to walk?
Did they need gold stars or textbooks
or rewards or punishments and bribes
if they weren't going to learn to walk?
Or were they so driven and curious and interested
to explore by themselves to learn to walk?
Chances are that if the baby is developing in a healthy way,
they're going to be unstoppable
in their quest to learn how to walk.
And that's not to say that they might not need some support
and that they don't need the right environments.
They absolutely do, but the point is that they are hardwired
to pick up the skills that are relevant
in their culture and in their species.
Humans walk and so children learn that,
same as learning language.
Children learn language naturally.
Now they learn it through play,
through testing things out,
through peek-a-boo games and through copying games
and through sing song, et cetera.
This is how children develop skills
and if you let children play for hours on end
every single day, you will watch them
develop the most amazing skills within their culture.
They'll learn how to use the tools and utensils
that we use in this culture.
They'll learn how to communicate different things.
They'll learn how to use their bodies
in the way that adults do in their culture.
They'll learn how to walk, skip, run, hop, jump,
turn upside down, flip around, et cetera.
They'll learn so many new skills
including reading and writing,
including mathematical skills.
If you read the research about children who play freely,
you will find that they learn all about number sense,
all about language, just through play.
And so free play, unstructured play
is so crucial in this regard.
It is the place that children develop and learn new skills.
Number two, children in play learn to take risks.
They learn how to go to the edge of their comfort zone
in any area, be it physical, emotional, academic or social,
they learn how to just take themselves up
over the threshold of discomfort to the place
where they can't quite do that thing
and then they master it by visiting that edge.
Listen, this is natural in all young cubs essentially,
all small animals, young animals.
If you watch mountain goats or monkeys,
what you will see is that the young children
are always swinging on a tree
that's just slightly out of their reach,
just slightly too hard,
or climbing up a mountian that's slightly too difficult
for them and this is how they master skills.
Number one, right, developing skills
because they take risks.
They push themselves naturally.
And what do we do in our culture?
We come in and push them ourselves
and then they protect themselves and they get defensive
and they say, "No, I don't want to learn to read.
"I don't want to climb the stairs or whatever
"because you're pushing me."
But when we don't push them, what we see is
that children naturally challenge themselves.
They naturally push themselves.
And you'll see this in the most classic games.
For example, the game of catch.
Why do children like to play catch or hide and seek?
Have you ever asked yourself this?
Why is this a universal game that children enjoy?
Well the reason is because they want to put themselves
in places where they have to stretch their skills,
where they're a little bit in danger, right?
That's the point of play often
is to simulate an adult reality
such as being chased or such as getting lost.
These are situations that are realities for humans
and so learning how to actually handle those situations
through a constant simulator throughout childhood
where they're able to pretend
but still experience that exhilaration.
Have you played catch recently?
You really get nervous, you really run away,
you really experience all of the same neuronal firings
that you would in a real chase
except it's without the real price that you may pay,
right, if you were chased by a lion.
If you're chased by your friends,
you are able to practice all of those skills,
to learn about risk-taking, to expand your edge
to push past that point of this comfort to the next level
so you can run faster and hide smarter,
but you learn to do so in a safe environment
and that is so important for play.
And children will do that in any area of life,
be it catch or hide and seek
or be it caring for a dolly or fighting with a friend.
That's what they'll do through play.
They will push themselves to take risks.
They'll climb a little higher.
They'll do something that's a little bit too hard for them.
And so it's so important to allow free play
so that they can explore those risks
and take those risks in a safe environment.
Number three is scientific exploration.
Listen, ironically, all of us parents
who want our children to turn out like Albert Einstein,
perhaps the most famous scientist of all time,
buy CDs like Baby Einstein and play music for them
and try to enrich them and try to teach them
and push them and control them and mold them
and expose them to science as much as possible,
not realizing that Albert Einstein
himself was a master of play.
He said that play is the highest form of research.
And in fact, for him, all of his physics was play.
It was just so fascinating.
It was just following his curiosity like a child.
Children are born scientists.
They're born ready to explore and experiment.
They will pull the cup, they will push things over,
they will mix things, touch things,
grab things, taste things.
They want to see, they want to look,
they wanna stop on the side of the road
and stare at the snail and we are hurrying them along
and saying, "Don't touch that, don't spill that,
"why are you doing that, why are you making a mess?"
Taking it personally, thinking it's in a front,
thinking that they are too slow or too fast or too curious.
That is the scientific exploration at work in childhood
and it's such a beautiful thing
to preserve as much as possible.
Children are naturally curious about the world.
They're asking why, they're interested to see.
Now is it convenient?
No, but raising children is not convenient.
Don't do it if you want a convenient life.
As Alfie Conn says, you're probably better off
raising tropical fish because children are inconvenient.
They need a lot of interaction and they want answers
and they wanna go at their own pace
and they wanna be able to taste, touch and smell
and get their hands and everything else dirty.
That's the power of scientific exploration.
And so this is sensory play at its finest.
It's mixing colors, it's measuring things out
with sand or water or beans.
Allowing our children to be scientific explorers
is going to set that stage, going to really ground them
in their curiosity and set them up for a lifelong curiosity
which is such a beautiful thing.
The next one is the ability to construct worlds.
In play, children can be the masters,
the directors of their own worlds.
It's an empowering place where they can create
a Lego world, a Barbie world, a Play-Doh world,
whatever it is they're using, sticks and stones,
and they get to be the directors,
they get to say what's going on in that world,
they get to act out, plan, design
and be the producers of their own show.
They get to feel the power of manifestation,
something that all of us adults want to do, right?
We want to create our own lives,
a business and a life that we love as Marie Forleo says.
We wanna create a world, a home, a community,
a school system, a health care system,
whatever your passion project is that reflects our values.
Children are doing that.
They're already in that place.
They don't have those voices in their heads that say,
"Who are you to change the world?
"Who are you to design the world?
"Who are you to say how it should look?"
No, they know that they are powerful creators
and they're there to create.
They create their little worlds
and they enact what they wanna see in it.
Constructing worlds, the design mind, the mind that says,
"I can create in the image that I have in my head,
"I can put it out into the world, out on paper."
You know, it's really amazing.
It's artistic expression but it's also architectural.
It's also value-based.
It's based on how I want to create the world,
how I want the world to look.
Number five is attunement to your body.
Children learn to attune to the schemas,
the urges that they have.
Through play, through free, unstructured play,
explore important schemas.
And these are just urges that they have.
I have a video all about schemas
if you wanna go into it deeper,
but things like the urge to transport things
from one to the other, to hide things, to envelop things,
to test trajectory, to test speed,
to feel different textures, et cetera.
All of the different body urges that we might have,
children know how to attune to their body through play.
They learn how to attune to their body
when they are free to play,
they aren't sitting still in a chair and writing at a desk.
When they are free to play, they're running around,
they're exerting themselves.
They actually push themselves into workout level sweats
naturally because they follow their bodies' needs,
they're in touch with the fact that now I need to stretch
and now I need to run and now I need to bare some weight
and now I need to rest and now I wanna sprawl out
on the floor and lay down.
Children attune to their body through play,
which is something that we quietly dampen
and quieten within them.
"No, you can't run around now.
"Now you have to sit still."
That's what we adults tell them.
And then we wonder why we all have backaches,
why we all are overweight, because we've lost that childlike
attunement to our bodies and to our bodies' needs.
Imagine a world where we didn't tell children
to sit down and be quiet, where we told them that whatever
their body wants to do, they should be doing,
they should be following, they should be moving,
they should be flowing with their bodies' needs.
Imagine how many health ailments we could prevent
if children maintained that attunement
with their body through play.
Number six is artistic expression.
We mentioned this on constructing worlds,
but artistic expression goes much further
than just building worlds,
it goes into emotional expression as well.
Children express their fears,
their anger, their joy through art.
When we show them a blank piece of paper,
they aren't overwhelmed, they know what to do.
They can express themselves, they can draw, they can paint,
they can sing, they can dance.
Children let things out, they process big emotions
just as you and I would through dance or through song
or whatever it is naturally when they're allowed.
But then we say, "Well, no, you're not drawing
"that correctly, you're not coloring in the lines,
"you're not dancing just right.
"Let me sign you up to a class,
"let me teach you how to do it well."
Completely missing the point that this child
is expressing what's within them.
They understand that life is a dance worth dancing
and that they don't have to have
ballet classes to do it well.
Number seven and perhaps my favorite aspect of play is
pretend play, emotional and social processing through play.
When children play socially together or even on their own,
they act out their lives and they can become
whoever they wanna become.
They put on a cape and they're a superhero.
They hold a baby and they're a mother.
They work at a computer and they're suddenly the boss.
Children can take on different identities
and they know what we adults have forgotten
which is that all of us are ever-changing.
All of us can become whoever we wanna become
just by pretending.
They know how to fake it 'til they make it.
They know how to step into different perspectives
and this is how they naturally develop empathy
and social skills because they learn what it's like
to be a mom by pretending to be a mom
and to be a teacher by being the teacher.
And they process that fear of mommy leaving them at school
by leaving mommy in the game.
They suddenly take on different roles,
test out different perspectives
in a way that we adults could really learn from.
This type of pretend play is crucial to emotional health.
It's crucial to social development.
And rather than thinking of it as leftovers
as what you should do when you're done with your homework,
we should be prioritizing this type of play
as the top priority for our children's lives.
So if this was helpful for you,
give me a love in the comments below
and I would love to hear which of these categories
is something that you wanna work on with your child,
that you wanna make more space for.
I don't mean work on by telling them to do it,
I mean allowing it to develop.
Is it constructing worlds or pretended play,
is it attuning to their bodies and moving,
is it artistic expression?
What of these are most pressing for you
and most interesting for you
and you're most curious about developing more in your life?
One of the best ways and I promise I'd give you a resource
to start reclaiming play in your home is to declutter,
simplify your environment and set up your play zones.
The way to do this is to download
my free childhood design guide over at
theparentingjunkie.com/design and work through it.
It's easy.
In fact, it's called 10 Easy Steps to Transform Your Home
into a Play-Inducing Haven.
It's my gift to you and I very much hope you will use it
and let me know how it goes.
If you would like to be part of a community
of like-minded parents, head on over to Facebook
and join my free group, Love Parenting with Avital.
We would absolutely love to have you
and your insights in there.
If this was helpful for you, I would love it
if you'd slam on that like button and share it
with anyone else who has young children at home
and you think would benefit from reclaiming play
or with teachers or caregivers who you know
who are looking after young children
and need some inspiration.
Now did you know that I've launched
a Parenting Junkie podcast?
I would absolutely love to have you over there.
It's separate content from what goes on over here on YouTube
and you can subscribe on any
of your favorite podcast platforms.
Just look for The Parenting Junkie Show
and don't forget to leave me your review and your rating.
I love to hear those.
Thank you.
I'm also on Instagram at Parenting Junkie
and if you were to snap a picture of your child at play
and hashtag Parenting Junkie
so I can get the joy of seeing your child immersed in play,
that would just make my day.
Now don't forget to subscribe.
Hit that notification bell
because next week, here's what's coming.
Today I'm gonna outline 10 things that people
who want to be peaceful parents,
respectful, gentle, conscious parents
should try to avoid saying and what we can say instead.