Your children need and want to be with you for no other purpose than the delight of spending time together. They want you to enjoy them, listen to them and play with them. Nothing strengthens your self-esteem more! So, shall we go out to a board game tonight? Playing board games is a simple and brilliant way to spend time together in a pleasant, entertaining and quality way. As a bonus, board games are plentiful in learning opportunities. They meet your child’s competitive needs and yearning to master new skills and concepts.
Board games don’t have to be clearly educational to be instructional. Just by playing them, games can teach important skills such as communication, waiting, sharing, taking turns, drawing, spelling, trivia, imagination, and enjoying interacting with others. Board games can promote the ability to focus and increase your child’s attention span, all things that video games and social media tend to degrade. Even simple board games like “Sorry” offer life skills like: Your luck can change in a moment, for better or worse. The intrinsic message of board games is: don’t give up. When you’re feeling down, you can get lucky and make it to the top, if you stay in the game a little longer.
Table games have clear restrictions and rules. Existing in a multifaceted society, children need defined boundaries to feel safe. By defining the playing field, much like soccer fields and basketball courts, board games can help your child weave his crazy, unpredictable side into a more orderly, developed, and socially acceptable personality. After all, staying within the constraints is critical to living a positive social and academic life.
Kids take board games seriously, so it’s vital that we guide them through the challenge. When a piece of the game experiences a setback, our children feel very sad; when they promote it, they are delighted, although we know that it happened by sheer luck. Therefore, you should help balance your child’s enjoyment of play with his limited ability to deal with frustration and loss.
For children under the age of 5, winning is crucial to a feeling of accomplishment. To a large extent, I think it’s okay to “help” them or even let them win. Around the age of 6, children should begin to adopt the rules of fair play, however questionable they may seem to a child who is losing. So I’m also okay with a six-year-old “adjusting” the rules to win if he feels the need. I encourage you to recognize your child’s need for clear rules. At the start of the game, she may want to ask, “Are we playing by standard rules or by special rules?”
Although ultimately we must teach morals, standards, parenting skills, and the importance of following rules, in the younger years, the primary goals are to help your child become more self-confident and motivated, and to appreciate playing with others. If you’re playing a game with more than one child, separate the family into teams and give each player a task they can do well: a younger child could be in charge of rolling the dice (which they think is important, since which is where luck comes in), and an older child tasked with managing the Monopoly money or being the banker.