Michelle Downes

So it involves inhibitory control, which is paying attention to things and stopping ourselves from being distracted by other things.

It involves cognitive flexibility.

So moving from one task to another.

It involves planning and organising our behaviour and working memories.

So, you know, when a child is sitting in school and junior infants and teachers giving them a set of instructions and they're trying to remember a number of things, they have to engage this working memory skill.

Yeah, absolutely.

So pretend play provides this really kind of fertile environment to practice and cultivate the development of these self-regulatory skills and really prepares them in terms of school readiness and other skills that they're going to need later on in life.

Yeah, absolutely.

So when a child is pretending, for example, with a peer and they're taking on roles and they're taking on characters and they have these narratives, they have to navigate this social context and this story that they're creating together.

So they have to remember what role they are.

They have to

Interact with the other person and really that engages complex social skills like even conflict resolution and so on that they're going to require when they enter these social settings later on.

Yeah, so parental playfulness is something that we've looked at the lab recently as well.

And we're seeing that it's really kind of linked to the emergence of some of these skills that are important for and linked to pretend play.

You know, parental playfulness doesn't come very easily to every parent.

You know, some parents find it very easy to say,

get on the floor and adopt a character, pretend they're an animal and they're creating the story with the child.

But for other parents, that's something, you know, parents said to me recently, it's a skill that they have to relearn.

You know, it's like they had to remember how to pretend play and how to be imaginative.

And if you're not someone who, you know, maybe did theatre and engaged in these kind of contexts as an adult, then you're having to kind of go back and reengage these skills again.