How to understand your child: 5 games that will open your inner world

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How to understand your child: 5 games that will open your inner world | Bashny.net

How to understand your child: 5 games that will open your inner world

Why the game is the best translator from “children” to “adult”
Children think in images, not schedules. They communicate through action, not through dialogue. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), 78% of a child’s emotional signals go unnoticed by their parents. But there's a way to set up that communication channel - gaming practices. We have collected five methods tested by neuropsychologists and educators to help you:

• Deciphering Unobvious Fears and Anxieties
• Discover hidden talents
• Building trust without moralizing

Game 1: The Emotional Designer
How it works:
Give your child a set of color cards with pictograms (joy, sadness, anger) and offer to build a “mood tower” of the day. Each color block is an emotion he experienced. A study from the University of Cambridge (2022) showed that this approach increases the accuracy of sensation recognition in children 4-12 years.

Tips for parents:

• Don't fix color choices - even if "anger" turns pink
• Ask open-ended questions: "What made this block get so big?"
• Building your tower in parallel will create a dialogue.

Game 2: The Fairy Tale Inverse
Why this is effective:
Ask to rewrite the ending of a famous tale. According to Montessori school teachers, children who change the plot of “Red Riding Hood” (for example, making a wolf a friend) demonstrate a high level of creative thinking and hidden protest against authoritarianism.
Key points:

• Use dolls or figures to physically implement ideas
• Fix repetitive patterns: If a child is always “rescuing” negative characters, that’s a signal.

Game 3: Space Dialogue
The technology of the future is here:
Create a futuristic entourage: a helmet made of foil, a “control panel” from the box. As an alien, ask questions about Earth: What is the most valuable thing in your civilization? What rules seem strange?” The UNESCO-approved methodology for intercultural programs reveals the child’s value system.

Important:

• Maintain game convention - do not switch to everyday language
• Use the “interpreter” – the soft toy through which you speak.

Game 4: Archive of Memories
Create an album of 5-7 photos/drawings reflecting the important moments of the month. Children under 9 years of age often choose events that are not obvious for adults: found a stone, a puddle after rain. As psychologist L. Petranovskaya notes, this is a “attachment map” showing what is really valuable to the child.


Game 5: Role-playing cocktail
Change roles for 15 minutes: you become a child, he becomes a parent. The theatrical method used at the Stanford Child Development Laboratory reveals:

• How children interpret your gestures and intonations
• What phrases in your vocabulary they think are meaningful

Conclusion: When a game becomes a language
These methods are not one-time “life hacks”, but a system of decoding children’s worldview. According to a 10-year experiment conducted by Boston University, parents who practice playful communication 2-3 times a week:

• 67% less likely to experience teenage rebellion
• 89% better at recognizing early signs of crises

Your task is not to become an animator, but to learn to hear a real person playing. As Piaget said, “A child is not a vessel to fill, but a fire to light.” And the best kind of fire for this fire is a sincere interest expressed in the language it understands.