Teaching your kids to play certain games while they are young can be a lot of fun. However, it is also useful for their development and psychological maturation. Games help children learn about strategy, patience, and critical thinking.
Unfortunately, there’s a window of time parents have when children are open to this sort of thing. Kids are often interested in games when they are very young, and then become progressively less interested as they get older.
As such, it is critical to strike while the iron is hot. Taking advantage of their natural curiosity early in life helps them do better later.
So, which games should you be teaching them?
Hide And Seek
Top of the list of simple, fun, and active games is hide and seek. Yes, it’s a classic, but it is also a game that gets children to consider spatial awareness and the perspective of other children (if they’re the ones hiding). They have to think about where to go to evade their gaze.
Hide and seek is best played in a group with multiple people. If the children are a little older, you can play it outside, perhaps in a forest with lots of buildings, or set up a capture-the-flag, to make it more competitive between teams.
Dominoes
Another game worth playing with younger children is dominoes. Again, it can be a lot of fun.
The basic, original game involves matching the numbers on the dominoes and blocking opponents’ plans. However, you can now get domino sets for rallies, where the idea is to set them up and then enjoy them as they topple over.
These dominoes can actually be more fun and varied than the original game. Many rallies have interesting features, like stairs for dominoes to climb as they topple, or slides for them to slide down.
Dominoes have a tactile nature that appeals to those over 5, so consider that as well.
Solitaire
If your child is a little older, you could also introduce them to solitaire card games, like Freecell. These force them to think strategically and improve their pattern recognition skills.
Solitaire is quite challenging, so children don’t usually complete a set the first time around. However, practice (and a bit of good luck) make perfect.
Furthermore, it is one of those games that is satisfying because it is hard. Kids want to play it to test their mettle and see what they can achieve.
Checkers
Checkers is another option if you want to play against your child. This game involves an 8×8 board with black and white squares, where all the play takes place diagonally on the black squares. The goal is to take all your opponents’ pieces and prevent them from obtaining “kings,” which can move backward as well as forward.
This game sounds complicated, but it is generally suitable for children over four years of age. Most of them can get the hang of it and understand the basic goal.
Charades
Thinking out of the box a little, you could also teach your child charades. This game is ideal for having fun while building cognitive flexibility at the same time.
Charades is all about being creative and putting what’s written down on a piece of paper into physical actions, without making any sounds. Other people have to guess what the person miming is trying to convey, winning a point if they get the right answer.
Charades is something children over four years old can usually play without too much instruction. However, it is best for kids over 6 who have a deeper understanding of how the world works and their place in it.
Chess
You could also introduce your child to chess if they’re smart. This game involves considerable strategy and learning, including understanding chessboard positions and trying to work out the next best move.
Chess is a bit like checkers in the sense that people play it on an 8×8 board. However, that’s where the similarities end. Unlike in checkers, players can move pieces from black to white (depending on the piece), and there are more than two types of pieces on the board.
Kids have to learn the complex interplay between the pieces, the tiles on the board, and the risk to their king. At first, these connections aren’t obvious, but they can grow over time substantially.
Card Games
We already mentioned solitaire, but it is also worth teaching your kid card games if you can. Go Fish and Crazy Eights are two examples, among many others.
Understanding card games is a skill that will stick with your children for life. They’ll know how to sit down at a table of seasoned players and hold their own.
What’s nice about card games is how they teach strategy and cunning. Children have to be clever to win.
Scrabble
If you’re worried about your child’s vocabulary, you might also want to introduce them to Scrabble. This game involves placing letter tiles on a board and aiming for bonuses to reach the highest score.
Scrabble is fun because you never know what works you’ll be able to make from your hand. Letter tiles can be random, and words can also be made from those already on the board.
Scrabble comes with an official dictionary, meaning that you can lay a word if it appears in the dictionary, but not otherwise. Usually, proper nouns aren’t allowed, unless they are in the Scrabble dictionary, in which case they are.
You can also use words that sound made up but are real, including archaic diction, which is always a lot of fun.
Uno
Finally, you might want to introduce Uno to your children before they get too old to play it. This colorful card game teaches the skill of color recognition (which many adults take for granted).
The idea of Uno is to match cards by color or number. However, special cards can put a spanner in the works by disrupting plans and making the entire experience far more challenging than without them.
