The Power of Pretend Play: How you can support young children’s power, identity and agency through play by Mike Huber

Children’s play often tells a story of power through the roles they choose to play: exercising power over, power with, or power for peers, adults, or phenomena from the wider world. Allowing and supporting these types of play, even when they may make you uncomfortable, is key to fostering children’s agency, self-efficacy, self-regulation, and sense of connection. Join author and early childhood play advocate Mike Huber in this webinar where you will learn practical strategies you can use with young children to support this sense of power in pretend play and in real ways.

In this inspiring and practical session, you will learn how pretend play allows children to practice executive function skills at a slightly more mature level than they might otherwise, or as child development theorist Lev Vygotsky put it, when children play, they are “a head taller.” You will discover that when children immerse themselves in a character they tend to stay regulated longer, maybe because they are slightly dissociated from themselves—“I’m not Mike, I’m Omega Supreme.” Children are emotionally regulated even as they embody characters who are in conflict. They are playing out the emotions while not experiencing them. This allows them to use mental flexibility rather than getting stuck in a dysregulated state as they might if it were an actual conflict.

Play fighting may worry us as adults, thinking that children are learning to solve issues by fighting, but it can have the exact opposite result as it improves their executive functioning. We do a disservice to children if we think of them as powerless. Perhaps they are when we view them from our adult world. But if we glimpse inside the world of their imagination, we can see their power is boundless, not in some distant future, but right here, right now, if we only take the time to look. Join Mike to discover the power in pretend.

In this webinar, you will be able to:

• Describe the executive function skills children learn through pretend play, including impulse control, focus, mental flexibility and working memory

• Identify ways that pretend play fosters regulation skills

• Explore ways of encouraging rich pretend play with materials, time and intentional interactions