You are listening to Monday Mornings with Dr. Mona where I am talking about the importance of

independent play and how to balance this with interactive play from a young age.

If you'd like to leave a question for Monday Mornings with Dr. Mona, call 954-526-2641

and leave a message and I may answer your question on a future episode.

Welcome to this episode which was a highly requested topic. Dr. Mona, how do I foster

independent play and I thought that interactive play is really important.

Both are essential so I am so excited to this episode because I love talking about child

development, infant development and so much more and the importance of independent play.

So independent play is not only great for your child but it's helpful for you to be able to do

something else while your child is playing. Obviously if your child is younger you are going to need

to be in the room for safety but it allows you to do something in the kitchen or send an email

or send a text message or be able to do things that you need to get done in that moment and allow

your child to be able to play and learn and develop through play on their own.

So why is independent play so beneficial for a child? So independent play is something that I

really tried to instill into Ryan from infancy and remember that interactive play is also very

important for cognitive and language development but it's the balance, the balance of interactive

and independent play that's so important and I'll kind of explain how we did this so that we

allow Ryan to have that interactive play but then we also allow him to just figure things out

on his own. So first what is independent play? So independent play is when your child is playing on

their own without you in their face. Pretty pretty simple but it is beneficial because it allows

your child time for emotional regulation so it allows your child to have downtime to relax uninterrupted

similar to us doing something we love and just decompressing. It can give them that time that they

...