What Should I Pay Attention To When Playing With My Child

Children learn about the outside world through play. The best communication tool between the child and the game is primarily the mother, father, sibling, or primary caregiver, if applicable. Then, the environment of children enters into their lives. Who is in the environment? Neighbors, peers, teachers at school, etc.

Children can play two kinds of games in the family.

  • Free games
  • Purpose games

In free games , families provide an environment for their children to play games at home and put the necessary tools in places where children can see. Children can freely turn to the game tool they want and include their families in this game. Families mostly take the role of “participant” by participating in the child’s play or as “observer” by watching the child’s play.

In purposeful games , more family has a purpose. For example, he uses game tools to teach pencil holding, to direct him to draw lines, or to improve his conceptual skills (color, number, shape, etc.). Families mostly take the role of “instructor” here.

Which of the free and purposeful games should you prefer?
Both can be preferred. The important thing here is to have a healthy communication with the child while playing.

What should I pay attention to when playing games with my child?
Avoid giving your children complicated instructions during the game:

Watch your child during the game and support his / her communication effort. You gave him an instruction. For example, “bring your car”, your child did not bring the car. Don’t confuse your child by giving complex instructions such as “Why don’t you bring the car, look on the table, look there”. Here, after saying “bring your car”, if not, you can hold your child’s hand and say “let’s get your car together” and go to the coffee table together. When you reach the coffee table, you can start the game by saying “Look, your car is on the table, now we got the car”.
While your child is playing, do not get distracted by another game before he / she has completed the game:

While your child is playing, he or she may turn to something else. It may be interested in the object or situation to which it is directed. Since the attention span is short, especially in young children, their games take a short time. However, interrupting your child’s play will interrupt his attention span. What should you do in this situation? If it’s time to eat while your child is playing, or you need to go out, here you can say that you will go to eat or go out before finishing the game. Like “we will eat in five minutes, we will go out in ten minutes” …

Since there is a concept of time in young children, they have difficulty understanding “five, ten minutes”. However, in the process, they will start to understand this. You can patiently teach it to finish the game with sentences that start like “in a minute, five minutes later, ten minutes later ……”. You will also support your child’s ability to wait with these small delays.