The Hidden Power of Letting Kids Play Their Way

How Less Direction Can Lead to More Discovery

Years ago as a young pediatric speech-language pathologist, I thought I knew a whole lot about children and play. After all, it was kind of my whole job. During sessions, my goal was often to find engaging activities that would motivate a child to practice the skills we were targeting. If a child was working on specific sounds, I might have them say a target word a number of times before taking a turn in a game. For younger children with expressive language delays, I would let them choose from a bin of toys and then expand on the words they had to build two- and three-word phrases. If the child could say “go,” we might pick a car or monster truck and practice: “Ready, set… go car go!”

About seven years into my career, I had a child of my own. Naturally, I approached playing with her in the same way. Play was often structured and on terms.  After all, I was the expert. I would pull out some of my old favorites from therapy sessions like a Potato Head, making it dance or putting its hat on my own head and pretending to sneeze - “A-choo!”- always a hit in therapy sessions  and, to my delight, just as funny at home. As my daughter entered into toddlerhood, I began to feel the frustration many parents face: refusals, power struggles, and constant testing of boundaries. Around that time, someone recommended Janet Lansbury’s Unruffled podcast. I almost skipped the episode on play, thinking I had nothing new to learn. I’m so glad I didn’t, because what I heard shifted my entire perspective.

Lansbury’s philosophy was one I hadn’t encountered before. She argued that children are born quite capable, provided we don’t stand in their way. An example she gave was Legos. If a child is never shown how to “properly” build with them, he or she might spend weeks, even months, simply sorting pieces by color, examining them, tossing them, or lining them up. To an adult, this might look like wasted time.  After all, Legos are for building right?  So naturally we want to step in and show them “how” to build with Legos. But to a child, all of that examining, sorting, maybe even banging on the floor, is learning.  One day, seemingly out of the blue, the child clicks two bricks together.  That moment has now been built on weeks of experimenting, testing, and discovering. Because they figured it out in their own way, the skill sticks, and the child is now prepared to continue building with confidence.

In the podcast, Lansbury shared another perspective that initially made me bristle: resist the urge to draw or color alongside children. Sit with them, yes. Encourage them, absolutely. Provide the crayons and paper. But don’t draw your own picture or color one right next to them. Why? Because no matter how much you downplay your skills, you’ve had a lifetime of practice, and your child hasn’t. That unspoken comparison can discourage them from trying at all. Think of it this way: how would you feel if you were attempting a brand-new recipe and your kitchen skills weren’t the strongest to begin with.  Then Martha Stewart pulled up a stool to cook the same dish beside you? Most of us would freeze, second-guess ourselves, or simply give up. For children, the same thing can happen when we unintentionally overshadow their first attempts at coloring and drawing. What they need most isn’t our version of the picture, but our quiet confidence that their version is enough.

I saw this play out in my own family. My son, nearly three years younger than my daughter, had the benefit (or maybe just the reality) of parents with less time to hover. I didn’t sit down and color with him nearly as much. Between Lansbury’s words echoing in my mind and the simple busyness of life, I gave him more space to explore on his own. I’ll never forget the day I looked down at our patio outside and saw what he had made with some chalk: two circles connected by a rectangle and a small square, clearly a truck. My two-year-old had figured out how to draw a truck without anyone showing him how.

What Lansbury was saying is backed by research. In Serious Fun: Preschoolers Engage in More Exploratory Play When Evidence Is Confounded (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), researchers showed that when children are given a toy and minimal instructions about “how” to play with it, they tend to experiment and discover more on their own. Contrasted to when the toy is fully explained, kids stop exploring and simply stick to what’s been shown.

For parents, this can actually be quite liberating. The takeaway is simple: you don’t have to do more, in fact maybe sometimes it’s better to do less. You don’t need to engineer every play moment, provide step-by-step instructions, or constantly invent games. Children are natural explorers. When we resist the urge to take over, we give them the gift of discovery, independence, and confidence in their abilities.

These experiences have taught me that play isn’t  just a way to motivate or connect with children.  It’s how they practice problem solving, storytelling, social negotiation, and my personal favorite, communication.  So the next time you set out the Legos, resist showing “the right way.” Let your child line them up, make a tower of mismatched colors, or build something you’d never imagine.  If they want to invent their own rules for Monopoly, go ahead and let them. If they want to stack blocks instead of race cars, go with it. When we step back, we allow children not just to play, but to learn in the deepest, most enduring way - through their own curiosity. And often, that’s when the real and most meaningful magic happens.