For generations, children have enjoyed dressing up. It’s something that they seem inclined to want to do instinctively. But why? What’s driving it?
Researchers think that it has something to do with the self-identification process. When kids are young, they’re still getting used to the idea that their bodies are avatars that they control through the minds to manipulate the real world. Putting on clothes is a way of finding expression and exploring what it means to be an actor in the world.
Dress-up play brings many benefits with it. Here’s what busy parents need to know:
It Helps With Imagination
As technology improves, a person’s imagination will become an increasingly important part of their lives. As robots take over more mundane tasks, kids born today will have to earn their keep using their creativity.
Dress-up play can help a lot with this. It allows children to take on others’ roles – like Robin Hood or Snow White – and put themselves in their shoes, quite literally. This simple act frees them up to take on the personality and characteristics of the people their costumes represent.
It Helps With Gender Exploration
As boys and girls grow up, they sense that gender is an integral part of their personal identity. Dress up play allows them to experiment with what this means in practice and how they can use their own gender to enhance their lives.
It Enhances Emotional Development
Sometimes, allowing children to process their fears by dressing up can help them develop into healthy, robust adults. Wearing a pumpkin t shirt at Halloween, for instance, is an essential way of showing them that ghosts and ghouls can’t hurt them.
It Builds Empathy
When kids dress up, they automatically get into a different role. And while this might seem unimportant from the adult perspective, it is significant for kids. It gives them a chance to slip into a fundamentally different role and practice their skills of empathy. They have to imagine how another person might act and behave, which is challenging if you’ve never done it before.
It Improves Cognition
When kids dress up, they activate multiple parts of their brains. Dress-up requires children to think back to things that they’ve seen and heard so that they can play a particular role. Dressing up as a pirate, for instance, means that they need to recall all the times that they saw how pirates behaved on TV shows and in books. The same goes for being a princess.
It Increases Vocabulary
Dressing up also encourages the development of vocabulary. Usually, there’s a theme that lies behind the costume. A doctor’s outfit, for instance, brings with it a whole universe of ideas associated with healing, disease, pain, and technology. When kids put on scrubs, it forces them to step outside their world and into somebody else’s.
So, in summary, if your child wishes to dress up, you should do what you can to encourage them. It could increase their rate of development and help to turn them into more rounded people.
