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Children learn through play, yet many must first learn how to play.

For young children and for many children with developmental delays, early play does not emerge spontaneously. It is nurtured. These children rely on adults to mediate their early experiences, to draw them into the back-and-forth rhythms of shared activity. The invitation is often subtle: a gesture, a smile, a gentle surprise. Through these moments, caregivers help children discover the pleasure, meaning, and purpose of interacting joyfully with another person.

A play-based approach to learning how to learn avoids dwelling on deficits. It begins with strengths, the child’s curiosity, interests, and natural inclinations. The adult mediator inspires and supports these interests when they are not easily produced by the child.

Connection becomes the doorway. Once the child feels safe, engaged, and capable, communication and exploration begin to unfold almost naturally.

The Transformative Power of Play

Play is not entertainment. It is the child’s royal road to understanding the world.
In play, children organize sensations, coordinate their bodies, explore cause-and-effect, and adapt to change. In its most genuine form, play becomes a vehicle for relating, communicating and learning.

The first steps of interactive play should be small, appealing and matched to the child’s developmental levels and skills. They do not need elaborate toys. Often, a simple activity, a rolling ball, a peek-a-boo gesture, a rhythm tapped on a table can become the beginning of a relationship. As trust and confidence grow, familiar routines expand. Variations are introduced. Simple actions gradually evolve into playful interactive sequences that carry meaning and continuity into everyday life.

Navigating Challenge

What happens when a child avoids, resists, or withdraws from play?

A child who withdraws may be overloaded. A child who repeats the same action may be seeking predictability. A child who avoids certain activities may be protecting themselves from discomfort or recalling earlier frustrating experiences.

Sensitive mediators adjust their pacing, notice subtle cues, and seize small spontaneous openings. A shift in tone, a gentle pause, a new object or activity, or a moment of shared surprise can reopen the door.
The goal is not to compel the child into play but to create conditions where play feels possible, understandable, successful and fun.

Grounding Play in the Familiar

Children learn most readily when something familiar is woven into something new.

A favorite toy airplane becomes the setting for reenacting a family trip. A beloved movie character inspires joint singing, role-playing or pretend scenarios. Everyday situations, birthdays, meals, and outings are loaded with possibilities. Preparing a pretend cake or building a makeshift fort invites turn-taking, symbolic play, planning and simple dialogue. These experiences help children practice sequences, anticipate what comes next and experiment with language and leadership.

Deepening Communication and Engagement

Caregivers strengthen engagement when they respond directly to a child’s interests.
If a child suddenly mentions “pita,” the adult might pretend to share one, offer a real one, or begin making one together. A fleeting idea becomes an interaction. A word becomes a shared moment. Take advantage of happy accidents.

Tone, rhythm, gesture and facial expression add warmth and clarity. Humor, music, gentle surprises and small physical movements help sustain attention and joy.

Equally important is avoiding what disrupts engagement. Too many questions, especially those that feel like tests, can shut a child down. Correcting errors can drain play of its spontaneity. Instead, adults can gently repeat, model a new action or offer a simple alternative framed with curiosity rather than criticism:

• “Let’s try another way, let’s try together.”
• “I wonder what might happen if…?”
• “Shall we experiment? Let’s find out.”

Play requires time. Children need time to think, to process, to imagine, to respond and to create without fearing mistakes or judgment. The absence of criticism and fear is one of the most powerful conditions for learning. Children need to feel confident enough to play.

Encouraging Agency

Play becomes especially meaningful when the child is occasionally invited to lead.
It may begin with small choices, selecting a toy or deciding who goes first, and gradually grows into co-creating stories, inventing rules or proposing new ideas, new rules and directions.

Interactive play helps to shape the early foundations of self-regulation, reasoning, planning and social understanding. Learning how to play leads to learning how to learn.

Essential Skills Cultivated Through Play

Enjoyable, well-supported play strengthens the foundation for many developmental capacities:

• Focused attention and the ability to shift attention flexibly
• Motor coordination and purposeful planning
• Visual and auditory processing
• Patience, waiting, understanding rules and anticipating what comes next
• Improved verbal and non-verbal communication
• Cooperative, spontaneous interaction with less fear of confusion or mistakes

Over time, children become more capable of making choices, following more complex sequences and integrating multiple sources of information.

Preparing the Ground: Building Prerequisites

Play is not a luxury. It is a developmental necessity, especially for children with delays.
Adults begin by offering activities suited to the child’s current strengths and interests. When a child’s interests are narrow, caregivers create environments that are rich, balancing excitement with calm, offering familiarity alongside discovery and novelty, courage with temperance, repetition with variation.

In this way, play becomes the scaffolding that supports broader understanding, greater self-regulation and more intentional, purposeful action. Play remains equally important for adults: a way of staying open, engaged and imaginative throughout life.

Adults Learn to Play Again

Many adults, parents, caregivers, teachers, and even trained therapists find playing with children difficult. Some feel awkward or exhausted; others were raised to believe that children, and certainly adults, should be serious and restrained. “We were not encouraged to play when we were children. It was not serious. It was stupid.” “My parents seldom played with us. Teachers never did.”

For adults who grew up with such messages, entering a child’s play world, especially a child who struggles with sensory, motor, attentional, communication or emotional challenges, can feel unfamiliar, embarrassing, or even frightening.

Successful interactive play begins when both partners, child and adult, feel comfortable.
Fortunately, there are teenagers, young adults, and experienced professionals who have a natural ease with play. “We can learn a lot from watching them play with our child.” They can show parents, caregivers, siblings, teachers, and therapists how to spark interest and communication and sharing in a child with diversity. How to pace an interaction, how to repair moments when things fall apart. It is even more fruitful when we join them and allow them to guide us. Most children love all the added attention and adult involvement. These gifted mediators guide not only the child’s playful learning but our own.

A Case from Practice: An Authentic Connection

During my first year as a psychology intern, I worked with a young, isolated boy who showed almost no interest in conversation or connection with me, or with his family, his teachers, or his classmates. Our sessions felt motionless, suspended, almost painful; minutes seemed to last for hours. Every attempt at engagement was met with apathy or avoidance, sometimes hostility.

One sweltering afternoon, I suggested a short walk. Maybe fresh air would help. Passing a waterbed store, I stepped inside with him, just to look around. Suddenly, he jumped onto one of the beds and began bouncing up and down. Impulsively, I found myself joining him, jumping on the bed. It was wildly unprofessional. But finally, we were doing something together, and we were smiling and laughing.

Then I noticed a small pool of water on the floor, evidence of a leak. I pointed to it. We looked at each other and immediately leapt from the bed and ran out of the store, fleeing the scene. We did not stop until we were breathless and safely around the corner.

Something had changed between us. A bond formed, not established in words but in shared mischief. It lasted through many future sessions.

On a later walk, he led me to his “secret hideout,” a wooded area near his home. I felt honored by the trust. But when I realized we were stepping on discarded hypodermic needles, the situation shifted. What had begun as play now demanded responsibility and protection. He showed me his private place because he trusted me and knew I cared.

Building Foundations

Play is the way children connect and the way children learn.  When mediators plan, structure, and share joyful and responsive playful experiences, children open up and discover ways to relate, to communicate, and to imagine. And through these playful discoveries, we build the foundations of safer, richer, more connected, and happier lives.

Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim

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