Do You Know Your Child's Play Skills? (Speech Therapist Explains Play Stages)

Hey, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com today we're going to talk about play skills. Why it's important, what the stages are, why would you go about to assess it, and so on. The first thing is play skills are important. Why? Because it's linked to cognitive ability. So it might give you insight about how well your child can. How developed their cognitive abilities are. Right. And it's because at this point in time, if a child is speech and language delay, we cannot do traditional IQ tests or whatever. Looking at play skills gives us a glimpse of how the child is developing in terms of cognitive and also serves as a context for learning. All right, so a lot of times when you have a higher ability to process rules, process many people together, it actually gives a better context to learn language. Let me give you an example. So if your child understands how to play chess, there's a lot of rules involved. It's also a lot of theory of mind, meaning the child can think in someone else's perspective. Oh, this guy's gonna do this. Why? Because, you know, like, they're putting their rook there, whatever that's called. I don't play chess. But they're doing that because they want to do this later on. So that's a very high level language skill, being able to think in other people's shoes. And it also gives us some sort of information about can a child do things? And we can do some assessments about language. Okay. Teaching play is very important before we actually go for the language. And as I talked about, higher language will only emerge in higher cognitive activities. So if your child is stuck and we'll talk about stages later on in this video. So if a child is stuck at mouthing certain toys in their mouth, how can we interject and provide language input? Because if you look online, a lot of therapists would talk about, oh, you gotta go down to their level, let them lead the play, and talk as much as possible to describe whatever's happening. Right. That's all good until your child is mouthing toys. Right. It's what kind of things can you say at that particular point? A lot of times there's holes in the knowledge outside on the Internet. By the way, our company, Agents of Speech, we coach parents on how to teach speech delayed children at home. And we found that if we focused on teaching the child play before teaching the language, it usually opens up a lot more possibilities. And then you can use the conventional wisdom of going down to them and doing some parallel talks, self talk, whatever. So play, teaching play is Very important. If a child is stuck at certain play stages, it's very difficult to teach any type of language because if they're throwing something, if they're banging toys, if they're kicking and they're mouthing, they're biting, talking onto it is going to reinforce that activity, first of all. Second of all is that they find it funny. They may or may not learn the word. It doesn't serve a language purpose. Okay. Anyways, so let's go down to what kind of play stages there are and why it's important. So play stages are important to understand because it gives us understanding about where the child is in general. So a lot of times when you see the autistic type of assessments, you will see that there are a lot of symptoms like lack of eye contact, unable to respond to name, not answering questions, yada yada. The main problem is that they didn't talk about what breakdown levels are. And we've talked about this a little bit before. If you want to, you can go to ww.agentsofspeech.com course to learn more about how you should go about teaching your child at home. Courses are free. Why we want to know what breakdown levels are. We have a different video about that. So what if they have the symptoms? So if you have stages, right. Then it gives the clinician, the speech therapist, you, a place to start off with. Okay, so it's a breakdown level is to a degree of what can they not do that skill. Right? So if you tell me, oh, they can't answer questions, they can't sustain eye contact, they can't whatever. Yeah, okay, to what degree? Why is it that they can't do that stuff? Okay. So play skills is one of those things that we can look into and analyze. So there are two types of play stages. Number one, the first kind is that we look at if a child can play with others. Okay. And there are stages of social play back in 1932. I'll put the link about all this below. It's just from textbooks. Dr. Partin is the person who did this. And we're still using these stages to certain extents, depending on what kind of assessment or screening tools you use. This is to my colleagues who are speech therapists. None of your business if you're a parent. But the stages are the first one unoccupied, meaning from infants. They start to watch people. Okay. And objects for with brief interest. They're not really that interested. And not engaging with them. For example, like they might stand at the side of a Playground, fiddling with her shirt. She glances up when a bird flies by and turns her head when hears another child's squeal. So I'm reading this off, I'll give the website and where I saw this, the examples, right? So infants, they just turn the head to whatever that is like, that's giving them stimulation, right? And then solitary play. And also happens in infant, the next stage, right? They're playing alone with different materials rather than with nearby peers. So they would rather go around and like play with sticks, kick something, throw something, so on, okay? And then they go on to what we call onlooker play. So usually speaking, it happens in toddlers, okay? And they start to observe peers engage in conversation about their play, but not engaging in direct play. So, for example, a child might be standing next to the monkey bars watching other children complete on how long they can hold on, right? The child then will clap when another boy holds longer for a longer time and asks if his hands hurt. So that's just on looking. And then parallel play is the next stage where it's also in toddlers, right? Still two to three years old, playing and engaging beside peers with similar materials, but focus on their own play. So, for example, there's a group of children, right? And while she's like the child scoops up the dirt with a shovel, the child next door starts digging the dirt with his hands, and the child next to them is moving dirt around with a child toy truck. But then that child doesn't engage with the conversation or seem to notice what other children are doing, and they're doing the same thing in parallel together, okay? The next stage is associated play. So usually happens in preschoolers. What happens is that playing, engaging with peers with same material but without a shared purpose, what does that mean? So, for example, if a child is scooping sands into cups, right, into signed boxes for other children, he comments on the child's bucket next to him and asks to borrow it. But in exchange, he gives the child one of his cups. So that child notices that other children are bringing sandcastles with bucket and builds one too. He calls his friends over to come over to the sandbox and they associate together, do the same thing, and they share tools. That's what it means. Okay? So the last stage is collaborative play. And obviously the. The social play doesn't stop. Here is this is only for just like up to preschoolers, generally, children do not cease to learn through play in mainstream schools after they get into elementary school or primary school. And that's because there's a change. And before it's, we use play to teach how to read. And then when we get to primary school, it's like reading to learn. We're reading stuff to learn stuff. Whereas before we're using different ways to teach children how to read so that later on they can use reading as a way to learn. Anyways, so collaborative play is also emperor schoolers, right? They start playing, engaging with their peers with the same materials and a shared purpose. They're doing the same thing, one project together, right? So who share tools are doing one thing together. You would see it like, and when you go to the beach, a bunch of kids, they just start making a sandcastle together. Someone's bringing a bucket of water, someone's digging up the hole, someone's making the moat, you know, so it's all about doing the same thing together. Okay. That's the collaborative as a social part. So a child can not have a lot of play skills, but they're super social. Right. So we see this a lot in children who are down syndrome cases. This is from my clinical experience only. Right. They have very good social skills, but when you assess and look at their, their main play skills by themselves, they may be lacking. Okay, and this is the reverse for ASD children. Right. They might be better off with like playing objects with their own, but when it comes to social, they have none. Okay, so, and this is like what, what we talked about before in our videos where, you know, like every skill has a vertical and a horizontal axis, right? So playing with other people, that's a horizontal axis. Meaning can we use it to generalize their play skills in other social settings? Anyways, then another play stage that we use is by daughter Cassie. Right. And the stages of object play, there's loads of these stages online and I've learned it throughout the years reading textbooks and stuff and looking at assessment forms. But this one is fine. It's just for you to understand how we usually look at things. So there are four stages, again, exploratory play, relational play, functional play, and symbolic play. So within symbolic play, there's a lot more inside. And you can look at the symbolic play test or whatever it's called, symbolic play assessment. And it drills down into like different kinds of symbolic play. But we're not here to talk about that. We're only talking about the big stages. Okay, so exploratory play happens when two to four months. Simple exploration of simple objects, shaking, mouthing, banging. Right. Squeezing a ball, putting a toy in the mouth, holding up a truck, looking into it that's exploratory play. And you might think that's two to four months. My child is still doing that at three. Well, these things don't go like. It doesn't mean that when you go down to the next level, you won't do the things up top. So it's more like a pyramid. So if someone who has already gone past exploratory play phase, right. But if they see a new toy, they might use exploratory skills to use that. Toyota. Okay. Anyways, the next stage is what we call relational play. Typically emerges at 5 to 10 months. Exploring how to use two or more objects together. Like stacking, building, you know, like putting stack cups, pushing it, that kind. Bumping two pot lists together, putting box into a bucket, piling all yellow foods together, you know, that kind of stuff. Okay. Functional play. Typical. Typical age is around 10 to 12 months. What it means is to relate objects together in a conventional way. Like for example, coloring crayons on a piece of paper, right. Putting puzzle pieces together, stirring with a spoon, using a toy knife to cut. And these examples would be like putting parts on a Mr. Potato head. I have one over here, right, this guy. So this Mr. Potato Head is a great way to check out if they know these kind of things. Putting animals into stalls and a toy barn, putting lid on a teapot. So again, a toy food set, a cook set is a good way to check. And then we have symbolic play. Again, symbolic play has a lot of different. There's a lot of different ways to assess symbolic play the best. The always speech pathologists, speech therapists, we use like a doll kit to try and do this. But there are some downfalls about that. I'll talk about that later on. Play typically emerge around 12 to 18 months. Right. What is this? Like children can now use the objects in a non literal way. Like for instance, using an object to substitute imagining an absence of objects. Right. If you don't have a spoon, you just do this to the doll. Giving agency and attributes to it to objects. Meaning this is for doing this, this is for doing that. Right. Carrying out multiple step sequences, meaning getting the doll ready for work, for sleeping, for going to school, whatever. The example would be feeding a baby with a bottle to their mother, putting a comb on a teddy bear's hand and pretending to have a brush his fur. Acting a sequence where figurines wake up, eat imaginary food and then go to school bus for to go to school. Right. So here they symbolic play. There's loads of different things inside there's something we call tool use, meaning can they use that tool for its intended purpose? Right. Other than that, can pretend, which is a higher level of symbolic play. And if you search online, you see a bunch. But I don't want to make it so that you dive into this stages, just like some parents would dive into stages of like. The hype word nowadays is gestalt language processing disorder. Right. There's stages there. I don't want you to go in and think, my child is a stage 4 symbolic place sequencing child. I don't want any of that. This is not like horoscopes or anything. It's just guidelines. Okay, so why do we want to do this? Why do you want to do that? Because it gives you an idea about where your child is, a breakdown level. And then you can start doing the things that are one step above for a kid. Okay. If you can do that for a child. Right. That's going to get so much clarity about what to do. And you will understand when a speech therapist doesn't need to be me, can be anyone in the world tells you, hey, you should do this. The reason behind it is because you need to think of a child in different ways and not just symptoms. So in terms of the language, they're like this, Their speech is like that, their play is like this. Their motoric skills are such. Right. Their cognitive ability is like that. Right. So you need to think in different ways. And play is one of the key components to help you unlock into a language. Right. So those are the play stages. Think about it. There's different ways that we assess play. We use screeners, we use assessments, we use non standardized test, meaning just free play. But I want to tell you there are different contexts for language. Okay, there's different contexts. This is where a lot of parents are stuck and a lot of clinicians are stuck because especially ABA would focus on the language functions of manding or requesting, as we call it. It's hard for you to always be doing things through play because it takes more training on your end to learn how to play. Because down the line, as we became an adult, we forgot how to play. And at the same time, you also need to remember that, you know, like play skills is something that even junior therapists struggle with. Okay. That was what I struggled the most when I start to be a therapist back in 2014 or something. It's hard. And that's why a lot of times we focus on the other functions of language. Like the easiest one is requesting or commenting or so on. So Forth, right? That's something you have to keep in mind. There are other functions as well for you to teach children language. All right, so how do we go about assessing and deem it as functional? Because a lot of times we get a lot of discussions online, whether it's parents or things, therapists or people who label themselves as autistic, they will say that, hey, this is functional in my mind, right? Banging two things together, throwing stuff, or, you know, like, lining up toys. Those are functional too. Okay, so what in my definition of what functional play is is that, you know, at the end of the day, the definition of play is something that makes us entertained by it. Number one, it kind of helps us with our brain because we don't find something too easy as fun. We don't find something too hard as fun. We like something just in between. That's play. Play is only enjoyable when it's at the correct difficulty level. So therefore, the difficulty level is the breakdown level, right? So a child will always stay, and you will always stay in your comfort zone. Later on, if a child keeps on being at the same level all the time, that play will slowly become a habit, right? And what play ultimately is is a simulation of something that you cannot really do in real life all the time, right? It's just. Think about it. For example, if I'm playing a pretend play with a doll, do I always have a baby? My baby's gonna grow up, right? When I'm playing chess, what is it? It's a simulation of something that we cannot do in real life. We cannot have a real knight. We can have a real rook. We're gonna have a real queen, right? But through game rules, we could do that. Like, for example, if we play video games, that's also a simulation of something we cannot really do. And it's fun because we cannot really do it all the time in real life. That's why it's play. So if you say that you line up something, what is a simulation of that? Right? At what times do animals go on a straight line other than Noah's ark, Right? Think about it. So what is considered functional should be deemed functional is that what are we using that play to simulate in real life? Okay? What means to an end are we trying to get to? Even for board games, right. If we're playing something that is totally outside of the world, we're still simulating that we're having a competition together, right? So that's why. Okay, and let's go to the part where a lot of parents would say, like, so how do we even teach, Teach play. What's. What's the point of this? So how do you teach play is that you focus on 100%, don't care about the language, don't ask questions, don't whatever, just play with it hand over hand. And teach your child to use the toys in a sequence. Excuse me, and hand over hand and help the children, help your child play the whole thing in a sequence. And then after that, reward them, whether socially or with like some tangible stuff which can be even snacks. A lot of times parents don't put play, don't focus play as a means to an end. A lot of times, when I just started with teaching children a play skill task can be even just putting train tracks together, right? And you know, like, it's just teaching them how to use tools, right? It could just be teaching them how to use a knife to cut a toy, food. It can be as simple as that. But a child will not feel that it's the play is fun until they start to understand the relationship between objects. And I always use this example. So, for example, like, if you, most of you guys are women, so if I tell you you got to watch football or soccer or whatever, why do men or basketball, why are men so into it and they can talk about this. And that is because they understand the rules. They understand the people behind it. They know what's gonna happen. So that's why you cannot enjoy it because you don't know the rules. And it's the same as men. We cannot understand. Makeup is about like, we don't know what, what the heck this thing is for. So that's why we're disinterested and we don't really care about the results, so to speak. Well, some men do. Like, not me. Needs a lot of time for a child or a person to understand the context, the rules, what the tools are used for, so on, so forth. What the terminologies inside of it is what to understand why it's actually fun. Okay? So anyways, the last thing I want to talk about is you have to be careful about individual differences when you're looking at play. One of the biggest ones is motoric skill. So if a child is not good at using his fingers or hands, it might be that their play skills are limited by their motoric skills, right? So therefore, the first thing before you even address the play skills is to go see an occupational therapist to see what you can do about it. And then be careful as well that children who are on the spectrum, they don't have a lot of play skills, and that's because they find that interesting. They find doing other things interesting. So when you're looking at it, they might have a lot of imaginary play inside that is overlooked. Right. And they won't be wanting to communicate about what they're imagining about. They won't be telling you that they're using this tool in a very particular way that is not acceptable in other, like in our setting and neurotypical settings. And so you have to look carefully and really observe. That's why play is one of the hardest things to assess, to teach, to do anything about, because everyone's different. Okay, that's all I want to talk about today, about play. I hope this was good. And if you haven't, Please go to ww.agentsofspeech.com course to see and learn from our free courses online. We also have a community of parents. As of this recording, nearly 10,000 parents are inside learning and talking. The whole community is super vibrant. It's the biggest parents community on the Internet. I'm pretty sure about that. And that's it for today. Thank you. I will see you in the next week. Bye. Bye.