Children’s Outdoor Toys and Creativity

Children’s outdoor toys offer a world of opportunity for pretend play and creativity. Role playing and pretend play are some of the most essential ingredients for healthy development. In a play house, your child can pretend to be a parent, chef, or mad scientist. Using a T-Ball set allows your toddler to emulate the “big kids” he knows, or pretend to be a major league player. By taking on these roles, your child will explore and expand their creative impulses in a healthy way.

It is very important for children to learn at a young age how to develop their imaginations. Toddlers, preschoolers and early-grade school children love to pretend that they are grown up, and often try to assist with adult chores. By providing them with lawn and gardening essentials of a suitable size, you encourage their natural instincts. Preschoolers are born mimics, and love to “help” you mow the lawn or tend the garden.

Toddler Push Powered Bobby Car

Here are some of the additional benefits of pretend play:

• Social and Emotional Benefits– With pretend play, the children can become whomever they want to be, without making a huge commitment. Because of this, they are able to get a very basic view of what it’s like to be a doctor with a toy hospital or what it’s like to be a chef with a play kitchen.  By playing pretend, a child can explore the world without leaving the safety of their own backyard.
• Sharing Benefits – Children playing together in a sandbox will naturally play side by side, and learn to share. Stock your sandbox with unique and interesting accessories and your children will soon learn they need to share their favorites.
• Communication—Pretend play almost always involves some form of communication. Whether your child is playing with friends or siblings, a beloved stuffed animal, or even the family dog, they are likely to be talking the entire time. Role playing helps your child build great communication skills, and will help him express himself well later in life.
• Problem Solving – Children will come across many problem-solving situations during role playing. For example, the ball is missing from the basketball set. The children must identify the problem (the ball is missing), and figure out what to do (find it, get a different ball, or use something like a stuffed animal instead).
• Creativity- Your child will use her toys in atypical and sometime bizarre ways. It is not unusual to find a child cooking and serving a shoe, or using the trampoline as a Barbie house, or the play slide as part of a fort. Pretend play allows your child to explore her imagination, and encourages out of the box thinking.

Pretend play is fueled by imagination. The most enduring and captivating toys are the ones that require the most creativity, and your child will return to them again and again. In a pretend play setting, your children will learn important skills that they will need in future, so be sure to present them with the tools they need to succeed.