Pretend Play Toys for Kids: 5 Things Your Child Will Learn Through Them

Children have interactive ways to understand and learn from the world. You might assume that they do not see everything that is happening around you, but you are mistaken. If you take a moment and think you will notice that all the little games that these children play are just reenactments of what they see. This is through their parents, the other elders, and their friends. 

Children learn from example and they role-play the parts that they think are important. This is precisely why many kids are incessant about kitchen play sets. They see their parents cook with various tools and want the best toy kitchen sets which have all the utensils and tools. 

Pretend play thus forms a very important part of childhood. They make their own narratives, not just imagine, but believe that it is they and their friends who are in charge of the situation. This is why they really want to continue playing and might even end up fighting with you because it is a world of their own where they have complete control over the things that happen. 

Many kids today are engaged in playing online games and toys. Because of the increase in the use of smartphones and the internet, it has become much easier for parents to keep the children engaged. While they have some great advantages, the excessive use of online and virtual games for children can have some negative impacts as well. Traditional toys and games thus play an important role even today. They help in the development of social skills, improve knowledge about the world around them, introduce novel ideas and help them explore their relationships with other kids of similar age groups. While online toys and games have can also help some of these, Playset toys have far more benefits than the former. 

Here are 5 things your child will learn through Pretend Play toy

1. Improves Imagination

Einstein famously said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge" and it makes complete sense. You would think children need just knowledge about the world we are in but imagination is required as much as the former. Kids are constantly developing and gaining new insight into themselves and the world around them. Pretend Play toys introduce them to their abilities of imagination. It hones their skills to think beyond the tangible and they create small worlds for them.

Doctor set for kids is the perfect example of how role play games improve imagination. The doctor kit for kids such as medical kit suitcase provides the children with some basic medical toys like a thermometer and stethoscope. The children then use the power of imagination to build a hospital ward, perform surgeries, and function like doctors and patients. If you listen carefully there are more twists and turns in their narratives than on a regular Greys Anatomy episode. 

2. Enhances Communication Skills

One of the foremost benefits of pretend play toys is that they increase the social skills of your child. A doctor play set, kitchen play set, make up set, or construction set would require your child to not just push their thinking, but discuss their thoughts with other children. When children role play, they work in roles like parents and children, physician and patient or someone who provides a service and someone who receives a service. This constant giving and receiving is quite an interesting phenomenon if you think. It is because communication is key in these pretend play situations. 

Something is always exchanged, given, or received. While you might wonder how your tiny tots have picked on these little social behaviors you should know that they are extremely intelligent. Pretend play toys and games invite children to think a bit further. While they enact the role they are familiar with, they create their own realities with their friends. This is a good exercise for building greater language and cognitive skills.

3. Resolve Disagreements and Conflicts

A child is always learning new things about the world. He starts with names of things, then understands the nature and concepts of these things. Sometimes it goes the other way around too. But most of the time children come across something and find it difficult to accept. You would see a lot of it in their social interactions with other children. These little disagreements lead to fights and whatnot. As parents and elders, it is your duty to direct your children towards the right path. 

Pretend play toys and role play sets can be used to resolve conflicts for children. These represent more than just toys for the kids. For example, a child has been acting angry and grumpy, refusing to talk about why they seem angry. Using a doll set, a parent can engage with a child and ask her or him about the anger. Because the pretend play set toy is part of their world of fantasy, children would feel like they are actually talking to the doll or a toy from their toy set. They find it easy to share their feelings. Sometimes when certain conflicts cannot be resolved directly in person parents can use pretend play to reach out to their child, understand, and help them in resolving the conflict the child is in.

4. Development of Emotional and Social Skills

Emotional and social skills are quite important aspects of human nature. To understand each other you must empathize, and for that, you need to understand your own emotions and pick on social cues. Children learn these skills through the means of toys and games, as much as they pick these from the people around them. Many a time they practice and perform these skills on the toys and through pretend play. 

Role playing helps children to empathize with each other. They would miss their toys, feel sad about a situation, happy, surprised, or angry even. These are all completely normal reactions when it comes to pretend play games. This is them figuring out their emotions, understanding how to feel, and process what they feel. Children with special needs have different ways of understanding and perceiving the world. It is important to be inclusive of them when we discuss toys that help with social cues and understanding others. 

5. Introduce Gender Neutral Toys and Role Play

Kitchen set toys for girls, car toys for boys? Wrong! The concept of assigning toys and games based on gender is quite the 20th-century idea. No, quite literally this process was devised in the previous century. It was around the 1940s when manufacturers figured that families who had enough wealth to speed on an entirely new set of toys would be ready to do so if the toys were presented as gender-specific for boys and for girls.

Gender neutral toys have been in vogue for the past few years since the famous Barbie doll-makers Mattel announced their first set of toys which come with clothes for all genders. The idea of gender roles, and that some toys are for girls and some toys for boys need to be relooked at. Many stores like Target have removed their boys and girls aisles, and have also taken down gender-specific color-based toys, games, and decor.

Kitchen play sets should be available to boys, and they should be able to pretend play as cooks and homemakers. If girls want to play with diecast remote control cars like Nissan GT R then, no one, including the parents should be stopping them. Moreover, the understanding that a girl can play only with a kitchen set in one way, which is pretend play and role play cooking, or playing with toy food is a regressive idea. Girls can play wrestling matches with their barbie dolls and action figures. Boys can pretend play as make up artists with make up sets but can also be driving race cars.

Pretend play provides the space to introduce novel ideas which can determine how the child views themself and other children. Letting them explore their imagination, and communicating their thoughts without any filter would make them free and happier. Constricting them, especially using toys and games would be cruel, to say the least. The idea that a toy determines gender or gender role needs to be stopped. Gender neutral toys help in making these ideas available and accessible to parents and kids. 

Check out our blog on 10 Benefits of Art & Craft Games for Toddlers & Preschoolers!

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