The Serious Work of Role-Play

Role-play activities at home and school are significant learning times. Children are developing brain skills that allow them to pay attention, remember rules, and problem– solve. These skills are known as executive function skills, and they are essential for any learning.

In role-play  activities, children develop language and social skills. These are not skills learned in a circle-time lesson. Children learn language and social skills by interacting with other people. Role-play allows children to try new words and behaviors to get feedback from their peers.

Role-play also allows children to practice particular emotion-driven behaviors such as creating, fixing, nurturing, and teaching. These are also basic building blocks of future learning and work. Again, these cannot be taught with worksheets at tables. Instead, children learn through experiment, practice, and interaction. Role-play might be the most critical part of a young child’s day!

It is also essential to look at what role play does NOT do. It does not predict what a child will be interested in at a later date. Young children try on many different roles to learn from them and to see what fits and what doesn’t fit. My daughter loved playing with trucks and wearing construction hard-hats. As a three-year-old, when we passed road crews, she insisted that was what she wanted to be when she grew up. I did not put too much stock in this as I knew she also wanted to be a mermaid. As an adult, she is an elementary music and art teacher. However, playing with building toys and fixing toys as a child may have encouraged her to be interested in tools. She is the person in her family who is most likely to make a house repair, and I am proud to see that.

Role-play also does not push a child in a particular direction. It is not an indicator of gender confusion, nor will it encourage it. My son played with his sister’s dolls and dress-up clothing. He tried on many different roles, but it did not mess with his understanding of who God created him to be. I like to think that he practiced the skills of nurturing, which put him in a good position as a school IT person. He has infinite patience working with teachers and students when computers don’t work. I know this because I am one of those teachers.

When boys play with what we typically consider to be girlish toys or when girls play within boy dominated play areas, we might be tempted to worry that they are confused about their gender. In fact, true gender dysphoria is very rare and shows itself in much stronger symptoms. When children play, they are learning and growing, testing and trying, and developing in the way God designed their brains to mature.

Especially in a world where screens around every turn tempt children, role play is more important now than ever before. Parents and teachers should encourage role-play, as well as other play that involves children interacting with each other at every opportunity.

Some Thoughts on Autism, Vaccinations, and Screens

I recently read an article talking about the massive increase in diagnoses of children on the autism spectrum. The numbers have been climbing – more like skyrocketing – for the last few years. There are more than likely a number of reasons contributing to this increase:

NO, it is not due to vaccinations. While the misleading information on this issue looks so slick and convincing, it is merely designed to bring parents to the point of fear. Here is how I know that vaccines DO NOT cause autism. MULTIPLE studies that checked for a correlation between the two show that children who are not vaccinated are just as often diagnosed with autism as those who are vaccinated. It does not matter what theories are proposed – the relationship is not there.

Some reasons for the increase have to do with definitions of autism and awareness, but a new intriguing theory suggests we might be creating some autism symptoms by exposing children to activities that delay their language and social-emotional development. These activities primarily involve screens. In fact, in some countries, when a child receives an autism diagnosis, the first therapy is to reduce screen use for the child as much as possible. This often reduces the symptoms to a point where the child requires little additional therapy. 

The reason screen usage might be contributing to the symptoms of autism is that it prevents children from engaging with other humans, and that is how children develop both language and social-emotional skills.(Deficits in these two areas are markers for autism.) Playing video games and watching YouTube will make your child good at screens, but will not help them to be better with communication or relationships.

I am NOT suggesting that keeping your child from screen use will prevent autism.There is no reason to believe screen use causes autism -- just that it might make some of the symptoms more likely.

I am NOT suggesting that you ignore an autism spectrum diagnosis and just reduce screen time.We will leave diagnosis to the experts and trust their suggestions for therapy.

However, I do feel comfortable telling parents that reducing screen time will not, in any way, hurt your child.If children never see a computer until school age, they will pick up the skills without a problem.

And I do know that if children do not develop communication skills, social skills, or emotional regulation skills in a timely manner, they will have big problems not only with relationships but also with anxiety and learning.

My advice? Get your children vaccinated and rethink your screen use and your child’s screen use. Let them learn how to be a human, first. Let them learn the way God designed their brains. We cannot improve on that.