You’ve probably heard of “free play.” Let children be so that they can lead their play. However, as mentioned in our survival guide on Independent Play, young children usually lead their play freely after they’ve had some layer of connection and guidance. Who is doing the guiding and the prompting? You!
Consider how:
It’s up to you to set up play spaces and source toys that are stage-appropriate. This is a huge layer of support even before your child starts playing.
It’s also up to you to support your toddler when they’re in the middle of playing and grow frustrated or get stuck and turn to you for help. Or, they just seem to want your presence—maybe even sometimes invite you to join them in their play and demonstrate great curiosity about why, what, and how. “Show me how this works, Mom and Dad!”
In these moments, it’s helpful to understand that “guided play” has benefits distinct from the benefits of “free play.” Studies have shown that guidance when an activity is too difficult or too easy can empower children to learn beyond what is typical in independent play (Hannikainen & Munter, 2018; Van de Pol et al., 2012).
Typically, free play is unstructured play with no direct aim.You can support this by providing a variety of tools and space and leaving your child to get creative and persist!
In contrast, guided play involves joint initiation and some structure.Your toddler is still leading their own play and making decisions, but you are there as a guide, and the activity itself has some direct or indirect goals. Maybe they chose some alphabet letters, and instead of leaving them entirely to themselves, you lean in to show them that the letter “S'' makes the sound “ssssss.” You stayed close to show them something cool about the letters. You can model how things work for both close-ended materials, like a puzzle, and open-ended materials, like magnatiles and Duplo blocks.
Both unstructured and structured play support your child’s learning and development, so it’s important to understand that the holy grail of toddler play is not necessarily removing yourself entirely. And it’s also not inserting yourself so much that you’re dominating their ability to choose and think for themselves.
There’s a really powerful middle ground in which you are like a facilitator—knowing when your insertion is empowering and enhances their play and when it is disruptive and interrupts it.
Guided play can be great to lean on when thinking about specific skills that your toddler is ready to practice. We can take time to source activities that might have specific goals like:
Refining their fine motor skills and their developing pincer grasp, so we choose a certain puzzle that activates this and we show them how it works.
Exposing them to new and robust vocabulary, so we offer some object-card matching work to intentionally help them label more things in our world.
Defining certain gross motor activities that target areas of need, like strength, coordination, and motor planning, so we take the time to set up an indoor obstacle course.
So, remember, free play is not the only way to play, and structuring play does not necessarily mean “top down.” It can actually be quite empowering to join certain aspects of your child’s play so long as you’re taking the time to ask, “How can I meet them on their level?” Not, “How can I get them to this level?” We can guide around the things THEY show are important to them.