Your children need and want to be with you for no other purpose than the pleasure of spending time together. They want you to enjoy them, listen to them, and play with them. Nothing strengthens your self-esteem more! So, let’s get a board game out tonight? Playing board games is a simple and brilliant way to spend time together in a leisurely, quality and entertaining way. As a bonus, board games are abundant in learning opportunities. They meet your child’s competitive needs and desire to master new skills and concepts.
Board games don’t have to be clearly educational to be instructive. Just by playing them, games can impart important skills such as communicating, waiting, sharing, taking turns, drawing, spelling, trivia, imagination, and enjoying interacting with others. Board games can promote your child’s attention span and attention span, all things that video games and social media tend to degrade. Even simple board games like “Sorry” offer life skills like: Your luck can change in a moment, for better or for worse. The intrinsic message of board games is: Don’t give up. When you’re feeling down, you can get lucky and make it to the top, if you stay in the game a little longer.
Board games have clear rules and restrictions. Existing in a multifaceted society, children need different boundaries to feel safe. By defining the playing field, much like soccer fields and basketball courts, board games can help your child weave his crazy and unpredictable side into a more orderly, developed, and socially acceptable personality. After all, staying within limits is critical to living a positive social and academic life.
Kids take board games seriously, so it’s vital that we guide them through the challenge. When a game piece experiences a setback, our children feel really sad; when it is promoted, they are delighted, even if we know that it happened only by luck. So you need to help balance your child’s enjoyment of play with his limited ability to cope with frustration and loss.
For children under the age of 5, winning is critical to a sense of accomplishment. To a large extent, I think it’s okay to “help” them or even let them win. Around the age of 6, children should begin to embrace the rules of fair play, questionable as they may seem to a losing child. So I also agree that a six-year-old “adjusts” the rules to win if he feels the need. I encourage you to recognize your children’s need for different rules. At the beginning of the game, you may want to ask, “Are we playing by standard rules or special rules?”
Although ultimately we must teach morals, standards, educational skills, and the importance of playing by the rules, in the younger years the main goals are to help your child become more self-confident and motivated and appreciate playing with others. . If you are playing a game with more than one child, separate the family into teams, giving each player a task that they can do well: a younger child could be in charge of rolling the dice (which they think is important, since that’s where luck comes from), and an older kid tasked with managing Monopoly money or being the banker.
