Teaching kids to play

A lot of people don't seem to understand this, but you actually have to kind of teach kids to play when they are little. If you never show them how you want them to play, chances are they are going to find a lot of things that you don't want them to do in order to amuse themselves.

A prime example is, unfortunately, my three and four-year-old nephews. Their mother is rather, er, hands off about raising them (that's a nice way of saying lazy), and as a result they don't really seem to know how to play without hitting, pushing, or throwing things.

My nephews also don't have the kinds of toys you would expect at that age, such as wooden toys or jigsaw puzzles, which I think is part of the problem. They have some cars, but mostly their toy box is full of dart guns and balls, which aren't really good toys for teaching kids to play nicely, and a bunch of push button toys — you know, the kind where all it's really good for is pushing a button and making it talk, or make gun sounds, or make some kind of movement. Those toys may seem really cool to kids at first, but they are also the kind that kids lose interest in quickly, because they only do one or two things and once you've gotten bored of that, you've gotten bored of the toy.

The difference I'm talking about here is, of course, open ended toys. A while back I read and thoroughly enjoyed a book called The Case for Make-Believe, which talks a lot about open ended toys and encouraging imaginative play. The author states that a good toy is 10 percent toy and 90 percent your child's imagination, and I totally agree.

But of course, you still have to teach your kids how to "play pretend" — or at least get them started. Once you show them how to use their imaginations, they tend to take it from there on their own, but they do need a little bit of guidance to be sure they don't learn bad habits such as playing too rough.