{"id":2537,"date":"2016-08-18T18:25:05","date_gmt":"2016-08-18T22:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parenttraining.chip.uconn.edu\/?page_id=2537"},"modified":"2026-02-14T16:16:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T21:16:31","slug":"expanding-play-skills-to-new-situations-using-naturally-occurring-reinforcers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/parenttraining.chip.uconn.edu\/index.php\/expanding-play-skills-to-new-situations-using-naturally-occurring-reinforcers\/","title":{"rendered":"Expanding Play Skills To New Situations & Using Naturally Occurring Reinforcers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Expanding Play Skills To New Situations<\/h2>\n
\"Used<\/a>
Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here\u2019s another important point about learning to pretend. You want\u00a0 your child to know that she can have fun pretending anywhere. So,\u00a0 after she\u2019s learned a pretend play skill, try to do it in other places in\u00a0 your house. Involve other adults or children. Have them play with her\u00a0 using these toys. When an adult learns to drive a car, we hope she can\u00a0 then pretty easily use those skills to drive a different car. And we want\u00a0 her to be able to drive in a new neighborhood. In the same way, we\u00a0 want the child to learn to play with a variety of toys, and then be able to play with them in different places and with different people. We\u2019ve discussed this before; it\u2019s called generalization.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the child will find it fun to try pretending while an adult is doing the real thing. For example, if possible, let the child practice stirring her toy pot while an adult is actually cooking in the kitchen. Make a big fuss over what a good job she\u2019s doing cooking while you or another adult is cooking too. If you\u2019re washing dishes, hammering a nail to hang a picture, or raking leaves in the yard, the child could be pretending to wash small plastic dishes, hammering something with a toy hammer, or raking leaves with a child-sized rake, next to you.<\/p>\n

USING NATURALLY OCCURRING REINFORCERS<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve talked in earlier sections about what kinds of reinforcers (rewards) you can use when your child is learning new skills. These could be food treats, tickles, praise, or favorite activities like bubbles. You may have seen that in this section, we didn\u2019t talk much about using rewards like treats, tickles, or bubbles for doing nice pretend play.<\/p>\n

When you teach pretend play, it is especially important to use what we call naturally occurring or natural reinforcers. Those are rewards that are part of the activity itself, rather than an unrelated activity or treat, like bubbles or a food treat. An example of a natural reinforcer would be if your child offers you a bite of a toy cookie. Rather than interrupt that nice pretend play with a new activity like bubbles, you could extend the play with a funny, enthusiastic response, like \u201cooh, yum, that is delicious, thank you for the cookie \u2013 and here\u2019s one for you!\u201d This keeps the play going. It teaches the child the idea of a sequence of steps. And it\u2019s also the kind of reward the child is likely to get from other adults and children when she is playing with them. You might have noticed in an earlier clip that after the little boy pretended to feed a baby doll, the teacher had the baby doll pretend to kiss him on his cheeks and then his tummy. This was another way of rewarding him for playing so well with the doll.\u00a0And of course, praise, and sometimes tickles, are always fine too, as long they don\u2019t stop the flow of the pretend play.<\/p>\n

RESOURCES:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

There are other parts of play, especially play with other children, which we haven\u2019t discussed in this program. These include taking turns, following rules, being able to lose a game without getting upset, and many others. Instead, we concentrated here on the earliest kinds of play. These early play skills are important for later social and thinking skills, especially the ability to pretend. If you are interested in more mature pretend, like role playing some occupations (firefighter, doctor, chef, etc.) and the other play skills that we mentioned in the beginning of this module as numbers 5 and 6, there are many great resources. Here are a few of them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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