Playing with puppets is one of the most educational activities you can expose your kids to. Watching a child play with a puppet may seem like fun and entertainment, but play with puppets is so much more.

There are great developmental benefits that are embraced when you encourage playing with puppets. 

Young children love to play a game of ‘peek a boo’ and a puppet is the perfect partner for this activity. Make a puppet from a paper bag or try your hand at making a string puppet using cardboard boxes or toilet rolls.

The purpose of the puppet is to create interaction, fun dialogue and even an element of surprise into your play and learn activities. Playing with puppets will benefit your child’s development in the early learning years. 

How do puppets help children’s development? It might be surprising as a parent to know that kids playing with puppets learn a great deal. They have the potential to improve language skills, creativity, social awareness, and more.

Language Development  

Children love to have ‘conversations’ with a puppet. Each verbal interaction with their puppet will encourage language development. Children who are generally shy really benefit from the opportunity to let the puppet be their voice. It is also possible to have a conversation between two puppets. Wearing a puppet on each hand enables the puppeteer to have a dialogue going on between two puppet characters.

Social Development 

The shy child, or the young child still learning social skills, has an opportunity to be more sociable through the medium of a puppet. The puppet becomes the spokesperson for the group.The puppet becomes the instructor and children often enjoy listening to the puppet teaching them to be sociable.

Emotional Development  

Puppets can teach children about their emotions.  Children can interact with the puppets as they share their ability to be happy, sad, angry, funny or jealous. Children can express these emotions too without upsetting anyone. Their puppet character is the one to feel these emotions. Playing with the emotions of the puppets helps to develop the characteristics of sympathy and empathy too. Children also experience this kind of expression when engaging in symbolic play.

Listening Skills  

Puppets are great tutors. The puppet on your hand can encourage your child to listen to it as it gives instructions or tells a story. Puppets can help children to learn rhymes and songs as they imitate the puppet too.   

Motor Skills 

There are a number of motor skills that children can improve through playing with puppets.  
The fine movement required to wear a puppet helps with dexterity and using fingers to manipulate the puppet improves fine motor coordination.  

Hand Eye Co-ordination 

Marionettes or string puppets help with eye-hand coordination as the puppet is made to walk and move in different directions. All these skills improve balance and directionality as the child has great fun playing with the puppet. 

Building Self Confidence  

Putting on a children's puppet show often happens quite spontaneously when children have access to puppets. 
It is really encouraging to see how children develop their self-confidence through the act of handling a puppet. As their confidence grows they will be happy to entertain family or friends.  
The puppet is centre stage and the child becomes more confident to speak in front of other people with the help of a puppet friend. 

Creativity  

Puppets encourage creativity on several different levels.  
Making your own puppets from recycled socks or paper bags is just the starting point. There are many interesting ways to create your own puppet characters. 

Story Telling and Sequencing   

Storytelling comes alive with puppets. Retelling favourite fairy tales can make it easy to think of puppet show ideas when starting out. Learning how to repeat the rhyming part of the story, like in the Gingerbread Man, helps with memory skills.  Puppets lend themselves to being the characters in your stories and allow your child to join in with the action. 

The creator of the Muppets, Jim Henderson, had this to say about the value of puppets:  “One of the nicest things about puppets is that it’s your own hand in there. You can make it do anything you want to.”