Baby Dolls: The Ultimate Tool for Play and Learning! 🍼✨
Who doesn’t love a good baby doll? While many of us have experienced our fair share of bottles, binkies, and diaper blowouts, you can never have enough baby dolls in your life!
Girls benefit from baby doll play! Boys benefit from baby doll play! This type of imaginative play is beneficial for ALL kids—don’t let mainstream media tell you otherwise.
Baby doll play doesn't have to be with a "baby doll" either! Does your child have a favorite stuffy? A favorite toy character they always carry around? Meet your "baby"!
The best part about baby doll play? It opens up a treasure trove of opportunities to teach and model imitation, pretend play, and language skills for your child (plus, the baby doll doesn’t cry in real life)! 🎉
Why Baby Dolls Are Essential for Development
Children as young as 6-12 months start to imitate the world around them. What do they see most? Parents caring for them and their siblings!
Baby dolls let kids mimic these nurturing behaviors—think kissing, hugging, and feeding the baby a bottle. If you have a play kitchen, crib, or stroller, you can take this to the next level by modeling early pretend play.
For older toddlers and preschoolers, expand the imaginative play by assigning character roles like “Mommy,” “sister,” or “brother.” Create multiple play scenarios (think events like cooking dinner or going for a walk) to encourage creativity and social skills. Playing “house” is a fantastic way to enhance imitation skills, pretend play, and both expressive and receptive language skills at any age!
SLP Pro Tip:
How to Maximize Baby Doll Play
Narrate the Play: Use 1- and 2-word phrases or short sentences tailored to your child’s developmental level to describe what your child is doing with their "baby". This helps build their vocabulary full of nouns and adjectives which in turn helps comprehension.
Expressive Grammar: Incorporate expressive language skills by working on verbs and plurals. What is "baby" doing? Is it time for sleep, play, a bath? Introduce early verbs or develop verb tenses by talking about “feeding the baby” or “rocking her to sleep.”
Receptive Concepts: Engage with early preschool receptive concepts such as size (big/small), actions (sit/stand), and spatial relationships (in/out, on/off) by playing house, hide and seek, or bringing their "baby" on all of your day-to-day adventures!
Final Thoughts
Don’t underestimate the power of baby dolls in home play AND pediatric speech therapy! They provide endless opportunities for language development, imaginative play, and social skills. So grab those dolls, and let the adventures begin! 🌈🍼✨
Tools For Better Speech
Click the pictures for a link to the toys that inspired this blog and my daily therapy!
<3
Sara
For more tips on using play to enhance speech and language development, check out our other resources!
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