Play
Why Pretend Play Is Important for Development
In an era of structured learning activities and educational apps, pretend play can seem like a soft option — what children do when there isn't somethi...
3 min read
Search Articles
Showing articles tagged with: #social-skills
17 articles found
Play
Teaching Toddlers to Take Turns in Play
Two toddlers, one red truck. The grabbing, the screaming, the parent leaping in to peel them apart — this is one of the most exhausting and predictabl...
9 min read
Play
Building Social Skills Through Play
The honest truth about teaching social skills under 5: you mostly can't. You can model them, you can coach briefly, you can engineer the situations, b...
8 min read
Play
Cooperative Play: How It Develops
Two two-year-olds dumping the same bin of blocks side by side is not cooperating. They are doing parallel play, which is exactly what their brains are...
7 min read
Parenting
Teaching Children to Respect Others
There's a moment most parents have lived through: your three-year-old grabs a toy out of another child's hands, you say "give it back, that's not nice...
7 min read
Parenting
How Siblings Affect Each Other's Development
Watch a 2-year-old try to copy his 5-year-old sister tying her shoe. He won't get it — but he's tracking her hands with the focus most adults can't su...
6 min read
Parenting
Why Pretend Play Is Doing More Than It Looks Like
Your toddler hands you a plastic banana and tells you it's a phone. A 3-year-old narrates an elaborate scene where the stuffed bear is sick and needs...
6 min read
Parenting
Using Everyday Moments to Teach Social Skills
You don't need special lessons to teach social skills. Mealtimes, transitions, playtime, and sibling interactions are full of opportunities to practic...
6 min read
Family Life
How Children Learn Social Skills Within the Extended Family
A lot of social-skill development before age five gets attributed to peers and preschool, but the evidence is that some of the most formative learning...
7 min read
Family Life
Relationships With Cousins and Other Relatives
Cousins sit in a sweet spot that no other relationship quite occupies: they share your family history but aren't your siblings, they're peers but with...
6 min read
Emotions
Emotional Intelligence in Early Childhood
Emotional intelligence in adults predicts a lot — better relationships, better work performance, better mental health, sometimes more reliably than IQ...
5 min read
Daycare
How to Talk to Your Child About Conflicts at Daycare
Your child gets in the car at pickup and announces that someone bit her. Or the lead teacher pulls you aside to say your child pushed another kid off...
7 min read
Daycare
How Daycare Affects a Child's Social Development
Daycare is where children practice the social skills that don't develop with parents alone. Peers don't intuitively know what your child wants. They d...
9 min read
Family Life
Board Games and Family Activities by Age
Games are one of the most reliable ways to spend genuinely good time with a young child — but only if the game suits the age. The wrong game with a tw...
7 min read
Emotions
Teaching Toddlers to Share: What Works, What Doesn't, and What Is Developmentally Realistic
The request to "share that toy" from a parent or early years educator, followed by a toddler's emphatic refusal and sometimes a meltdown, is one of th...
4 min read
Emotions
Peer Pressure: How to Help Children Navigate It
Conversations about peer pressure tend to focus on resistance: teaching children to say no, to walk away, to choose better friends. This isn't wrong,...
5 min read
Emotions
Peer Conflict in Toddlers: Why Children Fight Over Toys and What Adults Should Do
Two toddlers and one attractive toy is a reliably predictable situation: one will take the toy, the other will object, escalation will follow. Adults...
4 min read