4 Things To Look For In A Play Place For Toddlers

Wednesday, 26 June 2019 11:55

The toddler age is an important developmental phase for your kids. As they progress through their first 12 to 36 months, your toddler is developing important cognitive, emotional, and social skills. The activities you do with your toddler now can greatly influence how those skills develop. Toddlers need engaging and interactive stimulation, and a play place for toddlers is the perfect spot to do just that. But, not all play places are created equally! Here’s what you should look for in a high-quality play place for your young kids.

What To Look For In A Play Place For Toddlers

1. Safety And Security

It’s natural for most parents to be overprotective of their young kids. Your toddler is in a vulnerable developmental stage and they don’t yet understand the inherent dangers of the world. No parent ever wants their child to play in a potentially hazardous environment. Instead, the best play place for toddlers eliminates all security risks and prioritizes the safety of your child.

An ideal play environment for toddlers is hazard-free and consequence-free. A bounce house, for example, can offer your toddler this level of safety. As they play on inflatable surfaces and bounce around, your toddler can fall down face first repeatedly without injury. Of course, they may cry for a minute or two, but the safety of this environment lets them to learn freely. The more they explore and fall down, the more new skills they develop.

At The Bounce Place, we take the safety and security of your toddlers one step further. We enforce a strict age limit, only allowing kids 10 and under into our play areas. This rule removes the rough play of bigger kids from the area, so your toddler can play safely.

2. Plenty Of Room To Explore

Every parent knows how active toddlers can be. After they learn to walk, they want to keep pushing the physical limits of their growing bodies. They want to walk, run, jump, climb, and try anything and everything. All they need is the space to explore and test out their fine and gross motor skills. So, the ideal play place for toddlers needs to be expansive enough to provide those exploration opportunities.

It could be a large open area, a cutely intricate playground, or a tumbling maze of inflatable obstacles. Wherever you take your toddlers to play, make sure the area encourages and allows for curious exploration.

3. Space For Imagination

Maria Montessori once said that “Play is the work of the child.” No statement could more true for toddlers. Young kids need plenty of opportunities to play because that’s how they learn and develop new skills. Their creativity needs to be nurtured and encouraged at a young age in whatever way possible.

The right play place for toddlers should be a space that encourages imaginative thinking and creativity at every turn. Brightly colored environments and unique play structures can really get those creative gears turning. The play place could also offer intriguing and colorful toys to jumpstart imaginary fantasies. Soft building blocks, for instance, could be the perfect toys to inspire new problem-solving skills.

A bouncy castle could be an imaginary fortress for your child. A slide could be the plank on a pirate ship. However it happens, a good play place for toddlers should inspire your child’s imaginative spirit at every turn.

4. A Place To Share And Care

Some social skills are easy to pick up, but others are much more difficult to cultivate. Sympathy and empathy are skills that develop slowly over many years. As your toddler ages, they’ll inevitably enter a “mine” phase, where they become overly possessive and greedy. It’s a normal phase of their emotional development, but it’s not always the easiest phase to move past. A play place for toddlers should encourage them to break out of this phase and develop better social skills.

At most play places, your toddler will inevitably run into and play with other toddlers. Not only is it an opportunity to make a new friend, it’s also a great chance for them to learn that “sharing is caring.” You can use the toys and games of the play place to help your toddler develop those social skills. Try supervising their playtime with other toddlers and encouraging them to take turns or share toys. They won’t get better instantly, but each successful interaction is an incremental step in the right direction.

Visit The Bounce Place: The Best Play Place For Toddlers

If you need a great afternoon activity for your toddler, then you’re in the right place. The Bounce Place is the perfect environment to foster the developmental skills that your toddler needs. Our safe and spacious locations are the perfect places to stimulate your child’s creativity and develop their social skills.

Visit The Bounce Place today and you’ll see why we’re an ideal play place for toddlers!