If you are a new parent and you are thinking about what you can do to ensure your child has a good childhood and the best possible start in life as well as how can you help them enjoy Jesus and the Bible, there is so much that you might be thinking about. One of the most important elements, as it turns out, is play.
As long as you and your child are engaging in play, you are going to find that it’s much more likely that you will have a child who develops well and who is happy, while loving and owning their faith. So let’s take a look at this, and discuss in some detail why it’s so important that you play with your children and that they play alone and with others.
Powerful Learning
Play is one of the most powerful and engaging ways to learn, and the more that you and your kids are playing, the more that they are going to be learning too. This is something that is really important for you to bear in mind, and it’s likely that you are going to find it a really useful thing to consider if you are keen on trying to improve their ability to learn as much as possible.
If you and they are playing a lot, their capacity and ability for learning is always going to be vastly improved by this, so that’s a really important thing to consider here.
With faith, you can add play to faith or add faith to play. To add play to faith, you start with the faith element, say a Bible story, and then you add movement and silliness. For example, you may pretend the couch is a boat and you are Peter stepping off the boat to walk on the water. Would you tiptoe or jump? Maybe you try both?
To add faith to play, you start with the play that your children are already doing, say playing with blocks, and you scaffold in play. For example, you might say did you know that God is our strong tower? Or, perhaps you share the story of wise men who built their house on the rock.
Therapeutic Value
Play also has a strong therapeutic value, and there is much to be said for the use of play in this way with all kinds of kids. This might be because your child has a condition such as autism, for example – play therapy in autism is hugely valuable and powerful, and it’s really amazing what this can do for them.
But play as therapy is also valuable for any child, whether or not they have a particular recognised condition of any kind. So if you want to ensure they are experiencing something therapeutic, play is always going to be a good thing to incorporate into their lives.
Many of the games from play therapy are also great to bring to prayer with kids.
Sociability
Playing is also a really valuable way to learn to be sociable, and this is something that you are going to want to think about if you are keen on improving the lives of your children considerably. Sociability is going to mean that they have skills to love their neighbor.
If you and they are playing enough, and they are playing with other children of different ages, that is one of the best social education they can have, so this is a really valuable thing to try and encourage.
Those are just some of the main reasons that you should ensure you are going to encourage your children to play. You will probably find play comes quite naturally to them, so it’s just something that you need to try and encourage as much as you can too.
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