Why It's Not a Waste of Time to Play With Your Children

Sometimes all my baby wants is for me to sit down and play with her, and while we often extoll the value of reading aloud to our babies and children, I must admit I can have the tendency to look at those play times as vaguely annoying at best and downright irritating at times. I usually try and escape within 5-10 minutes of pulling all her toys out and hope that she stays amused.

It’s not a waste of time though.  At a young age, it’s helping them discover, shapes, colours, objects and as they grow older, we can help grow character and ideas through play time. 

I loved imagining as a child, especially with little people and role play toys, but I even made up stories using my marble runs, and would build houses for my one hundred marbles out of lego so that they were all lined up and out of the way at night time.  Putting them in a jar was boring. 

Mum would often let us pick out toys to borrow from the toy library which we loved and spent many hours imagining with these toys.  Perhaps it afforded her some peace and quiet when she wasn’t breaking up arguments about who was playing with what. 

My favourites were the Fisher Price, Little Tikes and Duplo house sets, and also the laundry, kitchen and baby change stations.  With the laundry set, I used to set it up like a Laundromat, pretending that my teddies and I were a small struggling family in the 1^st world war, my husband had just gone off to war and I’d just had a baby I mean seriously I was still playing with these as a young teenager, and just occasionally I could persuade Mum to come and sit in the room where I was playing and transcribe my little stories.  I still have those pages of blue handwritten notes of stories and one day I’m going to write them into something my baby can read.  

 I hope this helps you to look at your child’s play time differently, especially on those days where they are just begging you to come play too, and you can’t see forest through the trees or the floor through the toys. 

 The picture that I have above is ‘The Railway Station School’ a playtime that I am now developing into a story.  The railway station came from the toy library but I later bought it at one of their sales.