How to Promote Social-Emotional Play w/ Your Child
Happy February! The month of love is a great time to help your child better understand their emotions through social-emotional play. By age two children are aware of their feelings and the feelings of others. Modeling emotions through play is a great way to help your child understand emotions in different contexts!
Do you ever struggle with initiating play with your child? Here are a few tips based on the DIR-Floortime Model. Parents and therapists often use this evidence-based model to connect to improve play interactions.
Allow your play to be child-led. This means allowing your child to choose the activity. What are they interested in? If they are having difficulty choosing an activity, lay out some options. Children are often visually driven, so giving visual examples may be a more concrete way of helping them choose.
Get down on their level. It may be uncomfortable initially, but getting on your child’s level can greatly improve your interactions with them. Getting down on the floor with them will improve your ability to play and interact with your child and help them feel like you are an active participant in play, not just an observer.
Position yourself in front of them. Playing face-to-face with your child instead of alongside helps increase your one-to-one interactions, promotes eye contact, and allows you to read each other’s body language and facial expressions.
Now that we have discussed some tips on how to improve play with your child, let's talk about ways to promote social-emotional play. Here are 3 ways to help your child learn about emotions through play.
Engage in pretend play, and help your child label emotions during play. Pretend play could include playing house, acting out a story with dolls or stuffed animals, or making up a story together using various toys. This is a great way to build both speech-language and social-emotional skills. You can help initiate a dialog and ask your child social-emotional questions as you play. For example, “Wow, how do you think that makes Mr. Bear feel?” Remember children also read body language and facial expressions, so acting out what you are pretending to feel can help your child make connections.
Read together and ask your child about what and why the characters are feeling or acting a certain way. “I wonder why the little bunny feels sad? Would you feel sad if you were the little bunny?”
Explore emotions through drawing and coloring together. Give your child choices: “Would you like to color in pictures or create your own drawings? Would you like to use markers or crayons?” If they are unsure suggesting drawing a picture of your family, pets, or a favorite topic is a great place to start. Engage them in a dialog about what you are drawing. “I’m coloring Daddy’s shirt yellow because he looks happy, and I think yellow is a happy color.”
