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You’ll hopefully know by now that here at My First Five Years we are all about play. But you might be surprised to know that play is definitely not just for children. There are many scientific studies that have researched the importance and power of play for all ages. Dr Stuart Brown, a leading researcher on play, says that “we are built to play and built by play,”[1] and according to Scott G. Eberle[2] (editor of The American Journal of Play), “We don’t lose the need for novelty and pleasure as we grow up… play brings joy. And it’s vital for problem-solving, creativity and relationships.” 

I’m Cath, one of the My First Five Years content team. Before joining My First Five Years I taught under-fives for 25 years, so my working life has been filled with play. At My First Five Years, we are all about information for parents supported by research, so what does the research tell us about playing with our children? 

I am sitting in our front room, half-dressed as a princess (I cannot fit the costume over my head properly so it is currently looking like a synthetic, glittery straitjacket for misbehaving grown-ups). My three-year-old is serving me plastic cake from a small red plate. I say serving me, often he is insisting that I put the grotty-looking thing into my mouth and when I resist, he shouts toddler obscenities at me. He’s like a very pushy parent (?) and I am counting down the minutes until I can escape and make a cup of tea, or put the washing away, or do anything other than another second of this role play.

Parenthood didn’t come quickly to me and my partner James. We rode a hard and winding road to conceive, littered over five years with medical checks, unexplained infertility, failed IUI and rounds of IVF, before I finally fell pregnant with our twin girls. During this time I comforted myself by becoming a student of fertility – I studied books about infertility and IVF, and learnt the benefits of healthy eating, acupuncture and mindfulness meditation. When I took the happy call from the IVF clinic that my third try had worked and I was pregnant with twins, I could hardly believe my ears. Not just one baby but two! 

We know that for most parents life is busy and finding time to dedicate to activities that support your child’s development can be tricky, particularly in the week when we may also have work to contend with. However, we also know that opportunities for development and play are everywhere! In addition, children benefit from being allowed to get bored sometimes and from discovering new things for themselves.  

When we think about tantrums, we often imagine difficult moments that can feel challenging for parents, and we can sometimes have a negative view of this aspect of development. Although we all agree that our children’s tantrums can be difficult for us as parents, we think that this period of development is positive and shows us some really important steps in our children’s development. In this blog, we will look at what is happening for your child when they have a tantrum, and how you can support them.

When we think about creativity, we often think about creative arts such as dance, sculpture, painting and drawing, but it is also possible to be creative in scientific ways. Creative-scientific explorations can involve problem-solving, testing an idea to see if it works or is true, investigating, discovering and inventing. Creativity was traditionally thought to be limited to a special set of ‘creative’ people, but we can all be creative given the opportunity.

When you become a parent, you often find that everyone wants to give you advice. This advice is often well meant but perhaps one of the first lessons that we learn is to choose which advice we take!  

‘Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any other experience that reveals the human spirit’ - E.E. Cummings.

Have you ever sat and thought about how you managed to master a skill?