As a parent you need to interact and play with your child in order to develop your child’s language skills and their social and cognitive development.. To acheive this, a parent should aim to plan to spend some time during their day in order to interact closely with their child on a regular basis.

Before starting nursery and school parents, should be reading to their child often, so they are familiar with words and looking at pictures and books.

The term spending quality time is heard a lot and parents will say ‘I spend quality time with my child’. But what do they mean by this.

Play is about interaction with another person, not with a machine. So many young children these days are put in front of television screens or hand held devices for hours to watch or play on. Emotionally when children are playing on computer games they appear to shut off from reality and are unlikely to interact with others outside of their game. There is no research or knowledge of what damage that, this type of techno play might do to a child’s brain, long term. All these electronic devices out there were designed for adults in mind and not for children.

When my own children were young we used to have a No TV night on one of the nights of the week. At first the children hated the idea of this and would moan and say, I’m missing my favourite programme. Eventually though, they started to enjoy the No TV evening night and used to look forward to it each week. On no TV night we used to play traditional board games or charades.

If you want to try this you can take it in turns to choose what game that everyone plays as long as it is not a computer game. You could put everyone’s games ideas into a hat and draw one out. My children used to love to play categories which as adults they still like to play today.

Playing with your child,

• Involves getting down on the floor or to the child’s height level and keeping smiley eye contact.

• Letting your child take the lead in a play activity.

• Interact with them and use lots of verbal and facial language.

• Smile and laugh with your child, when playing in order to bond fully with your child.

When you play together your child will chatter and giggle with you and you will realise how much fun play ican be.