The Power of Play
Play is your child’s job. It is their occupation.
No, play is not simply a break in their day or a diversion from “real” learning.
Play is powerful.
Play provides children with meaningful, motivating opportunities to practice the skills they need for healthy development—across sensory, motor, emotional, social, cognitive, and executive-function domains.
How?
Children learn best when they are engaged, motivated, and actively participating. Play creates exactly those conditions.
When children play, they are constantly receiving sensory information, making choices, moving their bodies, solving problems, communicating, managing emotions, adapting to changes, and learning from the results of their actions.
These repeated experiences help strengthen and refine the brain’s neural connections.
Think about what happens during a simple game of pretend:
Your child may be moving their body, processing sensory information, remembering what happened before, imagining what happens next, communicating with another person, taking turns, solving a problem, controlling impulses, and managing emotions—all at the same time.
That is learning.
That is brain development.
That is the power of play.
The prefrontal cortex and other brain networks support skills such as planning, problem-solving, flexible thinking, attention, self-control, and social interaction. Play gives children meaningful, naturally motivating opportunities to practice these executive functioning skills repeatedly over time.
Putting It Into Practice
You don’t need elaborate activities or expensive toys to support development through play. Look for simple opportunities to incorporate different kinds of play throughout your child’s day.
Movement & Physical Play
Builds body awareness, coordination, strength, motor planning, and motor skills.
Try it: Create an obstacle course with couch cushions, play a game of tag, have a dance party, climb at the playground, or toss a ball back and forth.
Sensory & Proprioceptive Play
Gives children opportunities to explore sensations, understand their bodies, and practice responding to sensory information.
Try it: Play with water or play dough, dig in a sandbox, push a loaded laundry basket, build and crash a pillow pile, or help carry groceries.
Crawling in a Kozie Sensory Compression Sack is another great example of sensory and proprioceptive play, as the resistance of the fabric provides deep-pressure input while encouraging whole-body movement, body awareness, coordination, and motor planning.
Social & Cooperative Play
Builds communication, turn-taking, flexibility, perspective-taking, emotional regulation, and relationship skills.
Try it: Play a simple board game, build something together, take turns adding pieces to a puzzle, or play a game where everyone has to work toward the same goal.
Cognitive & Problem-Solving Play
Encourages planning, attention, memory, flexible thinking, and problem-solving.
Try it: Build a block tower, complete a puzzle, play matching games, create a scavenger hunt, or ask, “What else could we try?” when something doesn't work.
Imaginative & Pretend Play
Supports creativity, language, social understanding, emotional expression, and flexible thinking.
Try it: Play restaurant, build a pretend store, play Doctor or Veterinarian, dress up, or let your child turn an ordinary cardboard box into whatever they imagine.
And perhaps most importantly, get down on the floor and play with your child.
Follow their interests. Join their world. Let them lead. Have fun. And every once in a while, introduce a new challenge that stretches their thinking, movement, communication, or imagination just a little further.
You don't have to turn playtime into a lesson. The learning is already happening.
Because when your child is playing, they aren't “just playing.”
They're building skills, practicing life, strengthening relationships, and developing their brain.
Play is their job. And they are hard at work.
