Editor's Note: In light of the release this week of WELL PLAYED: The Ultimate Guide to Awakening Your Family's Playful Spirit by Meredith Sinclair M. Ed., I thought it was a good time to remind Savvy Aunties on the importance of what I have dubbed: “QualAuntie Time” and the value of play. Here’s an excerpt from my national bestseller SAVVY AUNTIE: The Ultimate Guide for Cool Aunts, Great-Aunts, Godmothers, and All Women Who Love Kids.


The Importance of Qualauntie Time

“Auntie time is quality time.” That’s a quote from my conversation with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of research and education at Sesame Workshop. She went on to say, “An aunt is not a teacher. An aunt is all about quality time—and really, time to play.”

What this means is, all the ways that us aunties interact with our young nieces and nephews—playing alongside them, reading them the same book three times in a row just because they want to hear it again and again, making up new games—can be critical to their cognitive, social and emotional development and future academic successes. In fact, you, dear Auntie, may be one of the few adults in your niece’s or nephew’s life who can provide that playful early education. (Quite jaw dropping to realize, no?)

These days, there’s a lot of pressure on parents to make sure their children are budding into baby geniuses with every passing day. After all, tykes sometimes have to take standardized tests just to get accepted into a good preschool! Meanwhile, with Mom and Dad doing double duty handling their careers and the household, the notion of carving out quality playtime often remains an elusive luxury. This is where qualauntie time comes in, because children learn best just by doing what they do best: play.

Play. As Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff state in their book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, play has become a four-letter word. It’s as if letting children just play is a waste of time, when really it’s an opportunity for them to discover things—learn things—through having fun. At play, they create their own games and use their imaginations. Not only does this develop cognition, it also gives kids a sense of mastery and independence, the authors say, which is what they need to enjoy managing their own lives.

Need more proof? Zero to Three, a nonprofit organization that fosters early childhood education, agrees that play appears to lay the developmental groundwork in babies and toddlers for better literacy down the road. Pretending—building imaginary worlds, creating symbols to represent other things—is like an early form of reading and writing. The group recommends a daily hour of unstructured play for a young child.

This is why your role is so important, Auntie. When we visit with our nieces and nephews, it’s about tea parties, role playing, and make-believe. It’s about play.

(If your niece’s or nephew’s parents ask you to help them with something like flash-card memorization, I support your doing so. However, that doesn’t mean that afterward, you can’t head outside to play in the mud. Unless you’re wearing white pants. But that’s entirely up to you, Auntie.)


Excerpted from Savvy Auntie: The Ultimate Guide for Cool Aunts, Great-Aunts, Godmothers and All Women Who Love Kids by Melanie Notkin (William Morrow / HarperCollins 2011). 

Photo of Melanie Notkin: britrock photography
Published: June 8, 2016