Being playful with your child is enjoyable and helps to strengthen the bond between you and your child. True play is fun. As children grow, they learn to initiate their own play ideas and rely less on adults to show them what to do. These times are often times where you watch your child grow and listen to their stories. As your children develop, their play also develops as they begin to play out ideas over several days, prefer to have peers to play with, and start to negotiate and cooperate with friends (which also means the occasional fight and disagreement).

However, some children, for whatever reason, find play very difficult. Play is complex and not all children develop the ability to play. For these children, supporting them within their sphere of interests helps to bring a deeper engagement and joy in play, and an understanding of the intention of play for themselves and with others. It is useful to observe children and look for what they are playing when they use toys (eg, Can they push a truck? Can they feed a teddy? Can they push a truck with teddy in the truck? Do they use objects like boxes and cloth?). Then to note how long they are playing, and what they are doing with the toys. For example, do they do the same thing all the time, or do they put lots of ideas together?

Learn To Play Therapy can be helpful for both neurotypical and neurodivergent children. It is a child-centred approach, where the therapist/worker/teacher plays beside, with, and responds to the child to enable a deeper enjoyment and pleasure in spontaneous self-initiated, intentional, pretend play. Play is uniquely meaningful for the child and is an expression of that child’s world. Learn To Play Therapy is a neurodiversity affirming practice, where the child’s unique strengths are supported, and the areas they find challenging are scaffolded in an identity-affirming way. We do not promote ‘masking’, or encourage children to hide their neurodivergent traits from others. Every child is seen as capable, and respected and accepted as they are.

We have provided resources which we hope are useful for you on our Resources page. Children under 6 years benefit from physically interactive play where they can manipulate toys and objects and create ideas and stories. Some children experiment with objects to see how objects relate to each other. When you watch these children play they will be carefully working out how objects balance on each other, or if objects can be partially hidden, or if objects can be put together in such a way that they make sounds or water can flow and so on. Many children create stories in their play and when you watch these children play they will most likely be treating a toy as if it is alive. You will see them act out events they have experienced as well as play stories that they have made up. Through play, children are understanding their world, they are understanding themselves, they are trying out ideas, and they are learning.

Our book, Explaining Pretend Play for Parents and Carers, provides further information on pretend play, and the role it play in a child’s development.