Imaginative Play: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Encourage It

What is Imaginative Play and Why is it Important?

Imaginative play (also called pretend play or fantasy play), is when your child uses their imagination to shape the direction of their play. Imaginative play is important for young children as it not only builds character, but it also helps adults understand children’s perspectives and how they view and take in the world around them.

What Are the Benefits of Imaginative Play?

While you may think that imaginative play is just for children, it can actually be a fun and engaging experience for you as an adult as well!

During imaginative play, you get to be anyone, anything, be any place and experience life outside of reality. During imaginative play, you get to be free! Embrace this opportunity as a way to spend quality time with your child and express yourself.

For children, imaginative play allows them to learn critical thinking skills, how to follow simple directions and build expressive and receptive language. It can also increase their social skills and help them learn how to better manage their emotions.

While children can handle exploring imaginative play alone,  you can play a key role in scaffolding your child’s development, making the experience even more fun and engaging.

Examples of Imaginative Play

Use the example below as a starting point for how you can support your child’s imaginative play:

Example: Babydoll Playtime

• Begin by playing with your child and a baby doll.
• You can start by adding words or actions to the play, such as, “Do you think your baby is hungry?” That will prompt the child to feed the baby.
• Now we have a baby and food. Next, you might say, “The baby made a mess with the food, what do you think we should do?” This question prompts the child to think whether to clean the baby by washing the baby or just changing the baby’s clothes.
• Another example would be saying, “I think I smell something, could it be your baby?” This could prompt your child to smell the baby and problem solve acting out changing its diaper. Now we, have a baby, food and a diaper within this imaginative play scenario.

Additional Easy Activities for Home

Looking for some more examples or recommendations? We’ve put together a quick list for you to use!

Singing Concert

• Materials needed: Any safe objects that can double as a microphone, drum, guitar or other instrument – like wooden spoons or pots and pans.
• Scenario: You and your child sing and dance to their favorite song, pretending to be the musicians and singers. You can also have them make up songs and beat their pots and pans to the beat they create.

Bus Stop

• Materials needed: a chair, the couch and paper to use as money.
• Scenario: You and your child can pretend to be getting on a bus to go to a fun destination. You can have them pretend to pay their bus fare, choose their seat on the bus and imagine and explain what they are seeing on the way to the destination.

How to Incorporate Imaginative Play into Daily Activities

Incorporating imaginative play into your daily routine at home helps promote the parent-child relationship and bakes this important developmental tool into your already busy schedule.

Bath Time Becomes Imaginative Play Time Too

Since bath time is typically part of a busy parent’s routine, we recommend incorporating imaginative play into this already planned part of your schedule.

By simply adding items into bath time, like toys or everyday objects like plastic cups from your kitchen, you can turn a regular bath into a fun opportunity for imaginative play. Washing toys can help children identify the difference between clean and dirty, while adding vocabulary words such as wash, soap, towel, water, clean and dirty.  For the cups, children can experience filling and dumping the water in and out of the cup, adding vocabulary words such as filling, dumping, full, and empty.

Bonus Tips: Imaginative Play During Halloween

When it comes to celebrating Halloween, children have the opportunity to live out the ultimate imaginative play scenario by dressing up and becoming their favorite tv, movie or book character. Support their fun even further by following a few easy tips for enhancing your child’s Halloween experience and helping them exercise their imagination.

Use Costume Selection to Spark Your Child’s Curiosity

When picking or creating costumes this holiday season, learn about the characters your children choose in advance, so that you can ask questions and spark their thinking and imagination throughout the selection process.

• You can ask them about why they want to be those characters.
• Have them act out the characters’ main actions or attributes.
• Make finding or making the costumes part of the fantasy play scenario, where they are on a journey that will lead them to becoming their characters once they get their costumes.

Set Your Trick-or-Treating Rules Before Heading Out

Before leaving the house, set and explain the ground rules for trick-or-treating with your children so that they can understand your expectations and ultimately play safely.

• Explaining the rules before leaving allows you to directly express the safe behaviours you want your children to embody once outside and, in turn, empowers your children to take on more responsibility for their behaviour and actions during actual trick-or-treating.
• By signaling to your children that the choice is in their hands, you allow them to experience greater freedom and autonomy, helping them build their confidence and decision-making skills.
• For preschoolers, you can use the character your child chose for their costume as an example on how following rules is important like, “I am expecting you to be a responsible superhero who does the right thing and holds my hand any time we cross a street.” Or, when the child is doing something outside of the rules, you could say, “Would Spiderman do that if his mom was watching?”

Alternative Venues for Halloween

If the weather is too hot/cold/rainy for trick-or-treating, you can still incorporate dressing up and imaginative play in other ways to still enjoy Halloween:

• Go to a park district Halloween event or party
• Find or organize a neighborhood Truck trick or treat
• Schedule a family bowling night with character
• Put together a family party at home (dress up)
• Put on a movie night with the family watching Halloween movies
• Create a fun “Halloween” themed dinner