Why Symbolic and Pretend Play is Important in a Child’s Cognitive Development

There are many benefits of symbolic play to your child’s cognitive development. For example:

  • Children learn many new skills through imitation. While engaging in symbolic play, they act out behaviors and scenarios they’ve observed in their daily life. While acting out these activities or behaviors, children develop their interests, or likes and dislikes. Given the opportunity to act out adult behaviors, a child may realize that they love tending to a baby but have less interest in driving a racecar (or vice versa!).

  • They gain an understanding of relationships between people and build social skills. When children are young, they may hug, rock, and kiss a baby doll or stuffed animal, demonstrating their understanding of relationships and interactions between adults and babies. As children get older, their symbolic play becomes more in-depth and interactive. They assign roles to others, communicate, and take turns while role-playing. This type of play also encourages children to work out social issues and deal with different emotions while playing with children and adults around them.

  • They problem solve. Acting out different scenarios allows children to be presented with a variety of issues or problems along the way. In a single symbolic play scenario, such as making dinner, a child could face multiple problems or complications:

    • The child may imitate a problem they’ve observed their parent solve, such as burning dinner.

    • They may have an issue finding the right surface or materials to make a “stove”.

    • They may have to solve a problem with a peer when both want to be the parent in this play scheme.

What can I provide to encourage symbolic play?

  • Different sized boxes – a single box can be an airplane one minute and a barn the next.

  • Adult clothing – what better way to feel like a grown up than wearing dad’s old dress shirt and tie?

  • Stuffed animals or dolls – this allows children to imitate their own life and explore different feelings and thoughts.

What are some scenarios I can create in my home?

  • Grocery Store: Instead of disposing of your trash, clean out milk jugs, jelly jars, cracker boxes, etc. and provide a few grocery bags. You can even expand the play scheme to create a shopping list or use construction paper to make money to pay for groceries.

  • Post Office: Save your junk mail and your child can be a mailman! Those handy boxes mentioned above can be created into mailboxes. This also provides exposure to numbers and letters.

  • Restaurant: Collect the take-out menus from your favorite restaurants and have a restaurant in your own home. Provide your child with some paper and a crayon and they can take your order (or the other way around!).

Kimberly Shlaes, MAT, DT