Reasons You Need to Play with Your Baby
Every single thing you do is fun for babies. If you play peek-a-boo with your baby, they learn about the world around them even when they don’t pay attention. When you play with babies, you help them improve their cognitive and social skills, which are crucial as they get older.
Bonding Skills
The reason babies love to play with you so much is that they get to spend time with you. They are bonding and learning about how to be a good friend. There is a lot they are learning about how people speak and act. It looks like they’re trying to figure out what can and can’t be done. They are learning how things work together. You’ll see them use these skills at home playing at their playpen, and outside as they grow up.
Motor Skills
Sometimes babies don’t move as well as they should. They look like they fall for no reason. Then, when you chase them around a small room or get down on the floor and crawl with them, they learn gross motor skills like moving their arms, legs, and body. That makes them more stable and coordinated overall. Crawling isn’t just good for exploring the environment around them. Crawling leads to more social interactions and makes infants pay more attention to social people.
As babies learn to stand up, they also start to work on fine motor skills, which we usually think of as “grasping” skills. The hands and fingers of young babies should be used to hold things in their hands, so this is why it’s essential to do this. Sometimes, games for babies will make them use these fine motor skills, like picking up plastic rings and putting them in the proper order.
Communication Skills
Babies are still not able to speak, but they pay attention to everything you say. The more you can give objects names, the better their early word learning and verbal skills. It doesn’t matter that they aren’t yet able to speak, but their brains grow very quickly.
Cognitive Skills
When babies play, they help build all the neural pathways in their brains that are important for thinking. People say this could happen even before birth. When a baby does something, those neural pathways get stronger and stronger. It might be because babies love to do the same thing over and over again. This is why. When we sing a nursery rhyme, parents can help their kids become more creative by learning to clap or tap on a drum by telling them how to move their hands. People know how to use cognitive skills like memory and concentration by having fun together.
It helps babies learn about the world around them when they play, and this helps them recognize and track things they see. In other words, they become better at following things with both eyes.