I attended a workshop last week in Malaga, led by a child psychologist and play expert. I left feeling like every parent in the world needed to hear what she said.
She opened with something so simple it almost felt too obvious: when we sit down and play with our children, we don’t just have fun. We connect.
And not just emotionally. Neuroscience research has shown that when a parent and child play together, their brains begin to synchronise. Their neural activity starts to mirror one another’s. Scientists call it bio-behavioural synchrony, and it strengthens the parent-child bond in ways that go far beyond the game itself. It builds the architecture for social, emotional and cognitive development.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s what’s physically happening in their brain while you’re playing a round of Uno.
The importance of play for child development
Here’s what she said we need to think about. During play, children aren’t just having fun. They’re practising skills that take years to develop and can’t be taught any other way.
- Focus and concentration. Staying with a game long enough to finish it is harder than it looks for a four-year-old. Every game is practice.
- Patience and tolerating delay. Waiting for your turn when you’re desperate to go is emotional work. Games make children do it again and again in a context that feels safe.
- Following rules. Understanding that rules apply even when they’re inconvenient is one of the foundations of being in a classroom, a team, a workplace.
- Thinking ahead. Even simple games ask children to consider what might happen next. That’s the beginning of planning and strategy.
- Managing frustration. Things go wrong in games. Pieces get lost, dice rolls are unfair, you pick the wrong card. Every one of those moments is practice for life.
- Winning with grace and losing without falling apart. These are the skills nobody is born with. They’re built, slowly, in the safe space of play.
The benefits of playing games with your child go beyond the game
She talked about what happens neurologically when parents play with their children rather than simply supervise them. The brain synchrony effect only happens when you’re genuinely in the game, not watching from the sofa.
Fifteen minutes of real play, where you’re fully present and engaged, does more for attachment and trust than an hour of being in the same room while both of you look at separate screens.
It also gives children something they need and rarely get: an adult who is genuinely trying to beat them. Not cruelly. Not relentlessly. But honestly. An adult who takes the game seriously enough to make winning mean something.
Child bad at losing games? Start here
She then said something that made a few parents shift in their seats.
- “If your child struggles with losing, don’t avoid games. Change the game.”
Start with cooperative games, the kind where everyone plays together against the game itself rather than against each other. Games where you’re working as a team to rescue something, solve something or escape something before the timer runs out. No individual winner or loser. You either all win together or all lose together.
A 2021 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology found that preschoolers experienced more enjoyment playing cooperative games than competitive ones. The pressure of winning is removed. Children who find losing overwhelming can still feel the joy of playing without the anxiety of defeat. They still learn strategy, communication and teamwork. They just do it without the meltdown at the end.
And then, once they’ve built that confidence through cooperation, you introduce games with a winner and a loser. Not to toughen them up. Because losing is a skill, and like every other skill, it has to be practised in a safe place first.
How to teach children to lose gracefully
Every hand in the room went up when she asked who’d ever let their child win. Mine too.
It’s natural. Seeing their face light up when they win is one of the best feelings in the world. But if we always let them win, they never experience what it feels like to lose and recover. Studies have found that children who were always allowed to succeed in rigged games became worse at reading social cues and making good judgements, because they’d never had to.
But the answer isn’t to go the other way either. A child who loses every single time doesn’t build resilience. They just stop wanting to play, because the frustration outweighs the fun.
The middle ground: let them lose sometimes, let them win sometimes, and when they lose, help them name what they’re feeling and move through it.
- “That was frustrating, wasn’t it? Want to go again?”
That one sentence teaches more than a hundred trophies ever could.
The Intellectual Puzzle Set and the PuzzlePop Brain Trek are both designed for the kind of calm, focused, side-by-side play that builds the skills Miss Sarah describes. The Puzzle Set has 128 blocks with 128 challenges that grow in difficulty. The Brain Trek has 500 progressive challenges in a compact case. Both are built for parent-child play, so the conversations that happen around them are doing as much developmental work as the game itself.
