17 Jun 2025

What if the most important thing your child needs today… is a little time to play with you? Play is how children explore, express, and engage with the world around them.

It’s how they make sense of their feelings, connect with others, solve problems, and discover their strengths.

But play isn’t just something children do on their own, it’s something they need to do with you, their parent or carer. Playing together benefits your child’s development and strengthens your relationship.

Whether you’re singing, building, pretending, or just being silly, those shared moments are very powerful.

Here are 5 key ways play helps children grow:

Physical play - running, jumping, climbing, learning a new sport or game - makes children physically and mentally strong.

It builds gross and fine motor skills, like hand-to-eye coordination, and helps bodies grow strong and healthy.

Social Skills

When children play together, they listen, negotiate, take turns, share, cooperate and collaborate to solve problems – all important life skills.

Playing builds confidence in themselves but also empathy by helping children think about their peers, also an essential skill for adult life.

Emotional development and regulation

Play provides a safe space for children to feel and express their emotions.

Playing with others can be an unpredictable roller-coaster of feelings - happiness, excitement, sadness and frustration – but provides the opportunity and practice to recognize these, learn how to manage the stress they can involve and develop resilience - again, all important life skills.

Cognitive skills

Playful learning encourages experimentation, risk-taking and critical thinking, and helps children learn how to develop strategies, think adaptively and solve problems.

The joy of play drives the development of complex reasoning skills, memory, and concentration, and much more effectively than rote learning and are again invaluable skills as an adult.

Creative Skills

Play promotes creativity and stimulates imagination. Whether imagining a chair as a fort, painting pictures, or making games and models from nothing, it helps children express who they are and how they feel, building confidence and self-reliance.

It helps them explore ideas, follow their imaginations, make the most of situations, spaces and problems – making them more confident adults.