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 let’s go out for a board game tonight? Playing board games is a simple and brilliant way to spend enjoyable, entertaining and quality time together. As a bonus, board games are abundant with learning opportunities. They satisfy your child’s competitive needs and desire to master new skills and concepts.
Board games don’t have to be clearly educational to be instructive. Just by playing them, games can impart important skills such as communication, waiting, sharing, taking turns, drawing, spelling, trivia, imagination, and enjoying interaction with others. Board games can promote your child’s attention span and 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 rise to the top, if you stick with the game a little longer.
Board games have clear rules and restrictions. Existing in a multifaceted society, children need defined boundaries in order to feel safe. By defining the playing field, much like soccer fields and basketball courts, board games can help your child weave their wacky, unpredictable side into a more orderly, developed, and socially acceptable personality. After all, staying within limitations is critical to living a positive academic and social life.
Kids are serious about playing board games, so it’s vital that we guide them through the challenge. When a game piece goes wrong, our children feel very sad; when they promote it, they are delighted, although we know that it happened by pure luck. Therefore, you must help balance your child’s enjoyment of playing with his limited ability to deal with frustration and loss.
For children under the age of 5, winning is crucial to a sense 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 embrace 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 to. I encourage you to recognize your child’s need for clear rules. At the beginning of the game, she may want to ask, “Are we playing by standard rules or special rules?”
Although in the end we must teach morals, standards, educational skills and the importance of following the rules, in the younger years, the main goals are to help your child to have more self-confidence and motivation, and to appreciate playing with others. If you are playing a game with more than one child, break the family into teams and give each player a task they can do well: a younger child might be in charge of rolling the dice (which they think is important, since which is where luck comes from), and an older child the task of managing Monopoly money or being the banker.