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When playing with your children, it is not only a quality time for your toddlers but also it helps you, as adult caregivers, because you can re-experience or reawaken the joy of your own childhood and rejuvenate yourselves.
Parents learn a lot about their child’s perspective, way of communication, and share a sense of humor through play and rereading their favorite childhood books together. Play enables children and adults to be passionately and totally immersed in an activity of their choice and to experience intense joy.
One study documented that positive parenting activities, such as playing and shared reading, result in decreased stress levels and enhancement in the parent–child relationship, and these effects mediate relations between the activities and social–emotional development.1
The most important thing is to know that playing with children is an opportunity for parents to engage with them by observing and understanding their nonverbal behavior, or sharing the joy and witnessing the blossoming of the passions in each of their children.
On the other hand, play can serve as an antidote to toxic stress and adult success later in life and can be related to the experience of childhood play that cultivated creativity, problem solving, teamwork, flexibility, and innovation2.
Dr. Riad Moubarak
Paediatrcian
