The Importance Of Playing Dress-up For Children
Playing dress-up is an important type of game that every child needs to experience. Children look for it naturally. When they play dress-up they are representing themselves as another person. They could be a policeman, a baker, a parent, or a dog. Children put on their clothes, shoes, a hat or something else and use it as a support to act out a role or tell a story.
Children develop ideas about the world around them when they engage in dramatic dress-up play. For example, when a child wears a tool belt or puts on a doctor’s apparatus, he is trying to figure out what it means to go to work.
Benefits of playing dress-up in childhood
Children grow and develop through dress-up games. The costumes they use help them to reinforce the settings so that these rituals have profound positive effects on their development.
Playing dress-up provides the following benefits for children:
Costume coupled with play encourages imagination
Children have great imaginations. They are not limited by what they know about the world, but their minds can go anywhere without limitations, taboos or restrictions. That will allow them to make connections unthinkable for adults.
When children play dress-up they ingrain their imaginative stories as if they were reality for a short period of time, giving them the opportunity to explore situations further. For example, when a child puts on a firefighter’s helmet, they also practice and experience helping people, community service, and courage.
Dress-up games allow the child to explore himself
By impersonating other people, children experiment with new ideas and behaviors. They can decide what they like and what they don’t like, they can explore the elements of a new situation and identify what they like and what they don’t like.
In his games, disguised, the child can make important decisions regarding his behavior or his role, which will help him to get to know himself little by little.
Dress-up games strengthen relationships
Playing in costumes is a great lesson in empathy. To “live” someone else’s life, a child has to put himself in his shoes. How do you feel? What are their motivations? How do they behave in certain situations?
This strengthens a broader skill, which is the ability to understand other people’s feelings. This is why dress-up games will help the child learn to deal with and work with people in school first and in their jobs later.
Dress-up games help establish gender identification
While there are no specific rules for gender identity, most people fall into typical categories. As children play in costumes they experiment with different gender identities and character behaviors.
Boys are generally drawn to the roles of fathers, builders, heroes, and the military, while girls are often drawn to the roles of artists, mothers, teachers, and dancers. Getting out of this is not bad, but it does allow you to observe the tendencies and interests of children. It is quite normal for children to experiment with different gender roles as they learn about themselves.
Dress-up games improve communication
Dressing up forces children to experiment with language. They have to anticipate what the character they are playing would say, including expressions, vocabulary, and even body language. This gives children the opportunity to practice and experiment with words and phrases that they do not normally use, as well as to review everything they have heard and think about how they can use it.
Words you might have heard in stories or cartoons come to life as you use them to enhance and expand your recreations. Over time, children create their own scenarios instead of using the ones they have seen before and begin to use these newfound words in conversations.
