Too much time spent passively watching TV is related to:
- Higher levels of negative emotions
- Aggressive behaviour and other behavioural problems
- Attention and focus problems
- More anxiety
An easy solution:
Balance your child’s day with more play!
Play involves physical and mental activity. It engages children and helps them achieve their developmental outcomes.
They use gross and small motor movement + build their ability to concentrate and solve problems.
What’s more it’s fun and a real mood-booster!
There are so many easy ways to integrate play into your child’s day.
We’d love you to use our specially curated Yay4Play kits but there are so many other activities that use what you have around the home.
The kitchen is a great place to find free tools and resources for your child. Keep away from the sharp stuff and the breakables.
Here are some great ideas for you:
- Spoons of all sizes are a cheap and easy way to practise picking up objects to build fine motor movement. Once your child has picked up the object, let them run from room to room or outside with the object in the spoon – don’t let it drop!
- Then of course, you’ve got those chopsticks. Picking up bricks or toys with chopsticks helps build focus and concentration. There’s fine motor movement too. Make it a game! How many objects can you pick up and bring to another part of the room in the next five minutes?
- There are also boxes in the kitchen. As long as there’s nothing breakable inside the boxes, build a tower of boxes. How high can you go? Plastic tubs are also perfect tools for great towers!
- Or even if they are starting to use colours or numbers, tell us what colour the boxes have in them. Try to find numbers on the box and identify the number.
- Nothing like an old-fashioned hide and seek. Quickly hide a few objects in different parts of the room and give a reward when your child has found all of them and brought them to you.
Isn’t that a whole lot better than being one of the over 70% of children in Australia who are way too sedentary? No one says that play has to be expensive or difficult to set up.
Use what is around you in the home and structure activities – even when it is often so tempting to just leave them passively in front of the screen. And what’s more, you will also have to stop using your own device to set everything up for your child which encourages you to communicate with them,
Play well!