Let’s Play! Give Children the Gift of Brain Power

As the Christmas holiday season approaches, some of Tulsa’s child development experts emphasize the importance of play in helping children’s growing brains develop creativity and critical thinking skills. Parents and others who are purchasing gifts for the little ones in their lives might keep the experts’ advice in mind as they look for toys that are not only fun, but help children’s brain development.

Abbie Webster is speech language pathologist at TherapyTown in Tulsa.

“A big part of language development happens in your brain,” she says. “Your brain has the most plasticity that it will ever have before the age of 3, and then it slows down significantly.”

She says that young children develop language through being read to, but, just as importantly, from physical, hands-on play. The physical play helps young children understand and experience their world.

“[Young children] have more areas to learn, and they’re developing all those motor pathways,” Webster says.

Isaac Johnson, a board-certified cognitive specialist and owner of Brain Balance in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, encourages a variety of experiences to develop all aspects of a child’s brain.

“The brain’s primary way to develop and build connections is through physical and sensory activities and then cognitive activities,” Johnson says. “Balanced play that includes gross motor, fine motor, sensory, cognitive, structured and unstructured play provides a solid foundation for a well-rounded development to occur.”

Jana Doyle, a former teacher, owns Kiddlestix Toy Store along with her husband, Chuck. She says toys can encourage play for brain development.

“Children are learning while they’re playing,” Doyle says. “They don’t necessarily have to be engaged in educational toys to learn new skills. While playing, kids are learning cause and effect, reasoning skills, fine and gross motor skills, and social and emotional skills.”

Floor Time and Child-Directed Play

Lesley Gudgel, executive director at Sprouts Child Development, says that play is how children learn, and laments the overly academic push on young children.

“There is such a movement now, even in schools,” she says, “that sitting little bitty kids at a desk and doing worksheets is the way to teach them. That will come as they get older. But play is how they learn [early academic skills] and how to negotiate with other kids.”

Just as play is important for learning, the experts say, children develop social-emotional skills when parents and caregivers play with them.

“We love face-to-face learning, playing on the floor together, engaging,” Webster says.

Gudgel adds that it’s important for play to be child-led.

“As an adult, you’re interjecting your perspective or your rules,” she says, but children may not follow those rules, and that’s OK.

“A stick can be something else or a box can be something else,” Gudgel says. “Rather than the adult guiding what they’re doing, it’s best that the child is able to use their imagination and that the child invites [the parent or caregiver in to the play]. They’re negotiating. They’re using their own imagination. It’s amazing what they learn just from those encounters.”

Webster explains how a simple toy, such as blocks, can spark creative and critical thinking. The blocks can be built to go up, but they can also come crashing down. A child’s creativity comes into play when the blocks become a tower for pretend princes and princesses. Critical thinking happens when children try to figure out how to build something. How does gravity play into it? If a bigger block is placed on a smaller block, will that work or not?

Gudgel advises parents to resist the urge to jump in and fix what children are building.

“You think, ‘That’s not going to stay,’” she says, “but they need to figure that out and, often, they figure it out pretty [quickly].”

Webster challenges parents to use their own imagination and think about new versions of play.

“Play isn’t always playing with farm animals the exact same way,” she says. “We can feed those animals. We can have those animals fly, and they can be fairy-land animals – whatever it is – using our imagination. Just because we have specific toys doesn’t mean we have to play with them a specific way.”

Less is More

Webster recommends rotating toys rather than overwhelming children with too much stuff.

“We need our kids to be attending better to the things that we’re giving them,” she says. “Giving them a room full of toys is going to be really overwhelming for their little brains and those developing minds. So, let’s give less and really concentrate on that attention to task.”

Johnson agrees.

“So often the problem isn’t finding the right toy,” he says. “It’s that the child has too many options and bounces from one thing to the next rather than staying and focusing on the toy or activity at hand. Find balance with activities such as spending time building a tower, or train set, or LEGO set, but then play with it and make characters act out stories that you imagine rather than reenacting exact scenes from a particular movie or show. Change it up and make a twist in the story each time.”

Johnson says fewer choices requires more imagination, and more choices requires almost no imagination.

Kid-powered and Open-ended

“For the most part, the more natural toys, the ones that children really have to do something to interact with it, are going to be best for brain development and social development,” Gudgel says.

“There is an incredible amount of brain growth happening while kids are playing with toys. Sometimes it’s the simplest toys that encourage the most growth,” Doyle says. “One of my favorite toys for encouraging brain growth is Magna-Tiles, a set of magnetic building tiles. Magna-Tiles are open-ended and encourage creativity and critical thinking. Kids can create all types of structures, while also learning about magnetic attraction.”

Gudgel says the simplicity of playing with paint, Play-Doh and even playing in the mud are all interactive activities where children can use their creativity.

For example, playing with sidewalk chalk, she says, develops both fine and gross motor skills.

“You’re drawing a great big sun,” Gudgel says. “That’s actually a gross motor movement that helps them so that when they’re ready to write, they’ve already had that input. They just bring it down to a smaller scale.”

These experts agree that the best toys are open-ended and can be used in a variety of ways.

“Something classic like a wooden train set is great for encouraging brain growth,” Doyle says. “Children work to put the pieces together to form a track, then are able to interact with the various trains and pieces to create different scenarios.”

Use Outdoor and Everyday Activities

Webster encourages parents and caregivers to involve their children in everyday routines as opportunities for play.

“Our lives are a lot more interesting than screens,” she says. “I love a family board game. We’re sitting down. We’re all attending to it together. We’re taking turns. We’re using those social reasoning skills and [thinking] ‘What’s going to happen next? How can I move past them?’ And you’re working on that little game theory and following rules together.”

Johnson advises limiting screen time and excessive sedentary activities in general.

“Get outside and smell the roses and play in the dirt. Do things that connect you to the world around you,” he says. “Activities that use all the senses and motor skills should be a daily practice. That provides the capacity and functionality in the brain both to memorize information and know right and wrong, but also the ability to apply what you know and learn from positive and negative consequences along the way.”

Gudgel says children also develop gross motor skills by being outside – running, swinging or playing hopscotch.

“Participate in outdoor activities with them but allow them to start making the hopscotch, for example. You can add on or just color on them with big chalk,” she says.

In the hustle of the holiday season, the experts advise parents to slow down and use every opportunity to engage with their children. Even Christmas shopping can be turned into a game.

“Play a game of ‘I Spy’ and work on critical thinking skills,” Webster says. “Kids can describe three things and then a parent will have to find it in the store.”

Beyond the holidays, the experts say play is a lifestyle with children of all ages. They stress the importance of parents maintaining a connection with their children.

“Engage when you can, while you can, how you can,” Webster says.

Gudgel says those playful interactions between parents and children build trust.

“As they get older, playing could be when the family goes skiing together, or playing basketball out on the driveway,” Gudgel says. “During those interactions, you have feelings of positivity and you’re laughing, which also kind of cement the relationship.”

“When the whole brain is developing and being used,” Johnson says, “then life will look much more balanced instead of lopsided and out of sync.”

Toys That Encourage Healthy Brain Development

• Play Doh
• Play kitchen
• Play workbench
• Wooden toys
• Books
• Board games, Legos, Puzzles, Magna-Tiles
• Toy grocery cart
• Toy stroller
• Stomp Rockets
• Sidewalk chalk
• Toy tongs
• Musical instruments
• Lovevery kit:  a subscription company that does a toy box for that age-appropriate kit.
• KiwiCo kit:  age-based STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Math) games.
• Memberships to museums, Discovery Lab, Tulsa Zoo or other places to encourage thinking and activity