Struggling With Tantrums and Big Feelings? Role Play Can Help
Tantrums, frustration, arguments over toys, difficulties waiting for a turn — if you have a toddler or preschooler, these probably sound very familiar. Young children can experience emotions with enormous intensity, while the skills needed to understand and manage those feelings are still developing.
We cannot expect a three-year-old to regulate their emotions in the same way as an adult. Emotional regulation is something children gradually learn through experience, relationships and countless opportunities to practise. And sometimes those opportunities appear in places we might not immediately recognise.
One of them is pretend play.
Role Play Can Help - People Who Help Us
Over the past couple of weeks at Fun Box, our People Who Help Us topic has involved plenty of dressing up and imaginative role play. We have had doctors examining patients, police officers writing reports, builders busy with their tools, teachers, hairdressers and café workers — and, on one particularly eventful day, our mud kitchen even “caught fire”. Fortunately, a team of very enthusiastic little firefighters was close at hand.
Pretending gives children a chance to practise real life
When children pretend to be somebody else, they temporarily step outside their own point of view. A child playing the doctor needs to consider the poorly doll lying in front of them. Is the patient hurt? How are they feeling? What can the doctor do to help?
That might look like a child with a toy stethoscope and a clipboard, but underneath the play they are beginning to explore care, empathy and concern for somebody else.
Our police role play offered another kind of social learning. The children explored the idea that police officers help people and that communities have rules and boundaries. Instead of rules simply being something an adult imposes — “Don't do that”, “Wait”, “You need to share” — children can begin to understand that rules often exist for a reason: to keep ourselves and other people safe and to help us live alongside one another.
These ideas sit right at the heart of Personal, Social and Emotional Development, one of the three prime areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). The EYFS describes all seven areas of learning as important and interconnected, with Personal, Social and Emotional Development forming part of the foundation on which children's wider learning is built.
How role play can help with tantrums and big feelings
Being a builder created a different kind of challenge.
There might be several builders, but perhaps only one particular tool that everybody wants. Someone has to wait. Someone needs to ask for it. Children decide who is doing which job, negotiate with one another and sometimes discover that their friend's idea is not quite the same as theirs. That is where role play becomes particularly interesting.
Children are not sitting down for a lesson called How to Share. They have a reason to share because sharing allows their game to continue. They are not completing an activity called Practising Patience. They are waiting because another builder is using the tool they need. And when disagreements inevitably occur, children have an opportunity — with adult support where necessary — to experience frustration and work out what to do next.
This is one of the ways play can support children who are still learning how to cope with tantrums and big feelings. Role play will not make strong emotions disappear, but it gives children meaningful opportunities to practise waiting, negotiating, sharing, coping with frustration and seeing a situation from someone else's point of view.
The Child Mind Institute describes pretend play as an important context for developing social and emotional skills. When children create imaginary scenarios together, they need to choose roles, agree on what is happening, respond to other people's ideas and resolve the little conflicts that naturally arise during play. It also gives children opportunities to explore emotions different from the ones they themselves may be feeling.
When the mud kitchen caught fire...
Our little firefighters probably weren't thinking about emotional regulation when they discovered flames all over the mud kitchen. We had decorated it with paper fires and the children had to make their way to the emergency, take aim with large water guns and knock the flames down. It was exciting, energetic and, most importantly, fun.
But consider everything happening beneath the surface:
The children had to take on a role, understand what that role involved and cooperate towards a shared purpose. They dressed themselves in firefighter costumes, waited for equipment, listened and communicated with one another and managed the excitement of the game. At the same time, aiming the water developed hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness and gross motor control. Moving around obstacles and crawling through tunnels brought further opportunities for Physical Development. All of this was happening while the children were completely absorbed in pretending to save the day.
Can pretend play actually help emotional regulation?
There is some interesting research in this area.
A 2019 paper, The Development of Emotional Regulation in Pre-Schoolers: The Role of Sociodramatic Play, looked closely at one four-year-old child who was experiencing angry outbursts and difficulties managing emotions. Over three months, structured sociodramatic play was used to explore emotions, practise alternative responses and develop skills including self-control, attention and delayed gratification. The child's measures of emotional regulation improved over the course of the intervention.
This case study illustrates rather nicely why imaginative social play may be useful: children can rehearse situations, feelings and responses in the safety of make-believe.
And while all this is happening... they're learning so much more
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about role play is that learning doesn't stay neatly within one area of the curriculum. While our children were exploring relationships, emotions and social rules, they were also developing almost everything else:
Our doctors used checklists and recognised symbols, supporting Literacy, while learning about healthcare and different occupations through Understanding the World. Police officers made marks as they wrote their reports and encountered new vocabulary through Communication and Language. Builders learned the names of tools while developing fine motor control and cooperating with friends. Firefighters used their bodies, imagination and problem-solving skills simultaneously.
Role play naturally supports Expressive Arts and Design because children invent characters, situations and stories. It introduces new language because every imaginary world needs words to describe it. It can bring in mathematical thinking through numbers, money, quantities, size, position and problem-solving. And it helps children build what we often call cultural capital — knowledge and experiences that broaden their understanding of the people, places and possibilities beyond their immediate world.
This is precisely why the EYFS emphasises that the seven areas of learning are interconnected, rather than seven separate subjects to be taught independently.
So, should we reach for the dressing-up box?
Role play is certainly not a cure for tantrums, nor should we expect young children suddenly to become experts at sharing because they have spent an afternoon pretending to be doctors. But it gives them something extremely valuable: practice.
Practice at waiting. Practice at negotiating. Practice at seeing another person's point of view. Practice at caring for somebody who needs help. Practice at coping when someone else wants the same thing. Practice at following rules that make sense within the world they have created.
And because all of this takes place through play, children often practise these complex skills without even realising that they are learning.
So the next time you see a child wearing a firefighter helmet, clutching a doctor's bag or serving an imaginary cup of tea, it is worth looking beyond the costume. They may be pretending — but the learning happening underneath is very real.
Very imformative read. Thanks for sharing 👍