Research shows the hidden benefits of challenging play, with parents playing key role

Parents play a fundamental role in building and growing children’s self-regulation through experiencing challenging play, where children are guided through the art of problem solving and in the process, come to understand and overcome challenges, new research from the Early Start Research Institute at the University of Wollongong has found. 

Led by lead author Dr Natalie Day, the researchers were able to outline the importance of self-regulation to a child’s development and long-term outcomes and explain how, with some simple tweaks to their behaviour, parents can help children as young as three years of age to understand and manage challenges and encourage greater self-regulation. 

“As parents, we often don’t realise that the home is the most influential environment for children’s cognitive growth and development,” Dr Day said.

“Children with lower levels of self-regulation have poorer outcomes in the long run. And this is a skill that can be learnt from an early age, especially in the preschool years but even older. Positive self-regulation is associated with academic achievement, mental wellbeing, school engagement, and social skills, but those who are less able to self-regulate are at greater risk of anti-social behaviours. If they don’t have these skills by the time they reach the school ages, it can be very difficult to bridge that gap.”

Published earlier this week in the journal Brain Science, the paper Effect of the Partners in Play Intervention on Parents’ Autonomy-Supportive Guiding Behaviour and Children’s Self-Regulation outlines that while many parents rely on early learning settings to guide core child development skills such as self-regulation, these are key skills which must be reinforced and taught at home too. 

As part of the intervention, called Partners in Play (PiP), Dr Day recruited groups of parents and children and watched and coached them through play over an eight-week period. The children were aged between three and five years of age, a time in which they are undergoing huge developmental growth. 

As the children took part in the weekly playgroups, at Early Start and parent-child play in their own home, the parents were encouraged to let them lead the activities and to face challenges, to not intervene before the children showed signs of challenge. 

When they showed signs of needing support, the parents provided them with supportive strategies to solve their problems, which enabled the children to build their autonomy and feel in control of their decisions. Importantly, the support that parents gave was dependent on the child’s signals for help, but not before.

“The idea is not that parents should stand back and adopt a hands-off approach and let children struggle – that isn’t the case,” Dr Day emphasised. 

“Rather, we focused on not jumping in too soon before the child showed signs of experiencing challenges. It’s about following their lead and not taking away perceived challenges that aren’t actually there for the child.” 

The researchers taught the parents the skills to support their children through challenges with words of encouragement, questions and hints, statements, and physical ways to support the children through their emotional peaks and troughs.

For example, if a child was struggling to finish a puzzle, rather than search for the pieces for them, the parent would encourage the children to consider what colour they needed and search for it themselves. In such a situation the child becomes the decision maker and develops the skills they need to find the puzzle piece, a strategy that they can take forward.

Those children who were given more independence and autonomy by their parents had the greatest improvement in self-regulation scores, Dr Day found. Often, she said, parents said they had been intervening in their child’s play, before they had trouble, without even realising it.

“Autonomy is a basic psychological need for all of us,” she explained. 

“But often as parents we remove all challenges, sometimes without even realising it, and we don’t let the child make their own problem-solving decisions themselves. It is our natural inclination to do so, but we need to let them experience challenges while letting them know that we are there to support them.”

“When we follow the child’s lead, we respect their development as they pick up and develop new skills, rather than us holding on to ideas about what our children can and can’t do.”

Many of the parents who were involved in the study were surprised at what their child could do independently, or about how their child solved a problem in a different way from what they thought they would do.

“Our guiding voice becomes the child’s inner voice, so what we say to our children matters,” Dr Day emphasised. 

“We need to let them know that they have the skills to build their own self-regulation and perseverance.”

“Playing is super important for children’s overall development, but many are missing out on playtime these days, especially at preschool, which is becoming more focused on academic skills. Studies also show that when parents spend playtime with their children, it really helps them to learn about the world around them and their place in it – this socio-emotional development is also an important aspect of healthy development.”

“It is about quality playtime, rather than quantity. It really helped to empower the children and fill their autonomy bucket.”

Access the study, which was funded by a Faculty Postgraduate Research Scholarship and International Postgraduate Tuition Award from the University of Wollongong, with a contribution from the NSW Institute of Educational Research—Distinguished Student Award, here.