Last week we travelled into London where we had been invited by the lovely Folks from Fisher Price to visit the Prima Baby Magazine HQ in honour of their brand new “Discover Your Way” Campaign.
celebration of all the wonderful and different ways that children like to play helping them
to
develop happily at their own natural pace.
Fisher-Price® knows that children are happiest developing at their own natural pace, creating
products perfectly-designed to feed children’s natural curiosity, encourage exploration,
stimulate imagination and facilitate discovery through play, to help babies learn and grow their
way.
Finn and Molly-May enjoyed the huge area full of Fisher Price Toys and their very own Fairy Heidi who keeped the bigger kids entertained:
We listened to Susie Boone from Madeformums.com and Dr. David Whitebread from the University of Cambridge who gave a very interesting talk about “Child-led Play”.
Dr. David Whitebread mentioned that allowing children
to play independently is an important part of their development:
- “The really big concern over
the last decade is the relative loss of opportunities for children to engage in child-led play.
Children’s lives are much more structured than they have ever been – and there is quite a lot of
evidence to suggest this can be detrimental. Parents can certainly be given guidelines about
productive ways of playing with their children, but it’s important that play is not structured all
the time”.I remember when i grew up (back home in Germany) that my Mum let us play a lot in the garden, we played hide and seek in the Forest or went off on our bikes to our local village playground. Being a Mum of 4 there was always plenty of housework, cooking and other work to do for her which meant we would play a lot on our own or with each other and it didn’t do us any harm.
I remembered that i use to love sitting in front of our radio for hours and hours wearing my headsets and talking into a microphone pretending to be a Top Radio Presenter and recording my very own radio show on tapes (i use to love talking from small on it seems!)
I really hope that both of my children will have such a great imagination as i had and they can enjoy playing by themselves.
I do think less is more and since Finn moved into his big boys room we also moved his train table from the living room into their and he loves going off into his room various times a day just playing with his trains, planes and cars and you can hear him making up stories (mostly Thomas related) and singing his favourite song.-
Here are the results of the survey
by leading parenting website MadeForMums in association with Fisher-Price who explored the play
time habits
of over 1,100 parents with children aged 0-3 years:
-
Here are the results of the survey
