Michelle Downes

Yeah.

So parents often naturally do this without even thinking about it.

So I was in a waiting room recently and, you know, I saw a parent with a baby who was not even one yet and they were pretending that a bottle was a spaceship.

And there was about a five minute, you know, scene there where they were doing, you know, three, two, one lift off.

There goes the spaceship and it's landing in all these different spaces.

And the child is watching the parent kind of apply these attributes to this object that is, you know, an inanimate object, which is now something else.

And they're creating this context.

And that's really kind of helping develop and nurture these skills in a child.

Books are fantastic.

Yeah.

So they really, you know, provide, I suppose, a starting point as well for parents and children.

And parents might, you know, see sometimes that a child is using books

kind of content that they found or storylines from books to recreate their own stories and scenarios later on.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, you often see with very young kids that they love taking on their favourite character, whether it's Bluey or Peppa and, you know,

you become Bingo or you become another character that they're very familiar with.

And that's just another way that they're showing their pretend play.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, it's really hard for parents these days.

You know, parents are really busy.