1/3 Of Malaysian Parents Only Spend Less Than 4 Hours A Week Playing With Their Kids
Playtime is crucial for a child’s growth and development.
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For children, playtime is learning time. Babies, toddlers, young children and kids of all ages use play to learn new things, like shapes, colours, sounds, and numbers. In fact, many child educators call for more play as kids learn best that way.
Recently, Toys R Us Malaysia conducted a survey on more than 4,807 parents in Malaysia and noticed some interesting results on parents’ playtime with their young children.
Some Malaysian parents may neglect the play aspect of their children’s growth. 33.4% of parents spend an average of only 1-4 hours per week of unstructured playtime with their children. That’s less than an hour a day!
More than a third also noted that they lacked awareness of child-appropriate toys. 36.4% of parents polled were not sure if their children had the appropriate playthings for their stage of development that could strike a balance between fun and learning development.
Credit: Freepik
However, parents also innately understand how important it is to enjoy playtime with their kids. 40% of parents feel rewarded when their children show off new skills they learned during their playtime, such as matching colors or naming animals correctly.
35.3% of parents are happy as long as their children are happy during playtime, showing behaviours such as smiling and laughing together.
In fact, only 11.2% of parents feel that it is challenging to come up with ideas on playing with their children. More than 80% of parents can play naturally with their children, though 64.8% believe that the addition of toys will add more joy to the playtime experience for parents and their young.
In a nutshell, the message for parents is: play with your kids! They will love and appreciate you for it!
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