Get on the Floor: Why Playing with Your Kids Is One of the Most Important Things You Do

Put down your phone. Get on the floor. Wrestle, chase, build a fort from the couch cushions, or throw a pillow with a three-count warning before it arrives.

This is not a metaphor for engaged parenting. It is, literally, what the developmental evidence recommends.

SM Ulfah's 2025 review of father-child play interactions, published in the International Journal of Education, synthesizes research across three categories of play — physical, constructive, and imaginative — and finds that each contributes in distinct ways to children's cognitive growth and socioemotional formation. The paper's conclusion is plain: play between fathers and children is not supplementary enrichment. It is a primary developmental context, and its absence leaves a measurable gap.¹

What the research actually shows

Physical play — rough-and-tumble wrestling, chasing, tickling — develops the child's capacity to read social cues under arousal. A child who has been wrestled by a parent learns, through hundreds of repetitions, when the other person is laughing versus genuinely distressed, when force is playful versus threatening, when to push and when to yield. Ulfah's review places this in the context of socioemotional regulation: children who engage regularly in physical play with their fathers show stronger impulse control and greater tolerance for frustration in school settings.¹

This maps onto what researchers like Jaak Panksepp documented in animal models. Juvenile rats deprived of play partners emerge more anxious and less exploratory than their counterparts — not because they are broken but because the play-system in the mammalian brain requires activation to develop properly.² Jonathan Haidt, drawing on this same line of research, states it plainly: if you deprive mammals of play, they come out more anxious. Children are mammals. The neural architecture is not metaphorical.³

Constructive play — building with blocks, assembling puzzles, working together on a project that has a goal — trains executive function. When a father sits down and builds a marble run with a five-year-old, something more than the marble run is being constructed. The child is learning to hold a plan in working memory, revise it when a piece doesn't fit, defer immediate gratification (the satisfying crash of demolition) in favor of a longer goal, and tolerate the mild frustration of failure without abandoning the task. Ulfah identifies constructive play as a specific pathway to early mathematical reasoning and spatial cognition.¹

Imaginative play — the elaborate fiction of cardboard-box spaceships and stuffed-animal kingdoms — develops language, narrative comprehension, and what developmental psychologists call theory of mind: the capacity to model what another person knows, believes, or feels. When a father voices the dragon and then asks what the knight is going to do next, he is helping the child build the cognitive architecture for empathy.¹

Taken together, these three modes of play are not three flavors of the same thing. They train distinct capacities. A child who only ever does one of them is getting a partial development.

The obstacles are real, not imaginary

Fathers report several recurring barriers to play: exhaustion after work, uncertainty about what to do, self-consciousness about looking foolish, and the ambient pull of their own phones. These are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing with moral exhortation.

Exhaustion is legitimate. But research on parental engagement consistently finds that the threshold for meaningful play is lower than exhausted parents assume. Ten focused minutes of physical play produces measurable changes in cortisol and oxytocin in both parent and child. The problem is not usually a lack of time. It is the difficulty of transitioning from the cognitive register of work — analytical, performance-oriented, result-focused — into the register of play, which is process-oriented, contingent, and temporarily purposeless by design.

The self-consciousness problem is worth naming directly. Many fathers, especially those who were not played with much as children, feel genuinely awkward when asked to get on the floor and make train noises. Jordan Peterson, in a lecture on early development, describes his wife's similar difficulty — she had older siblings who didn't play much with her, and when he tried to signal playful roughhousing with a three-count pillow warning, she was completely dismayed.⁴ The awkwardness is real. It is also something that dissolves with repetition. The first five times you play are the hardest. After that, the child does most of the work of pulling you in.

The phone is the most structurally resistant barrier. It exploits the same reward circuitry that makes play pleasurable and redirects it toward a stimulus that requires no physical or emotional reciprocity. Haidt has noted that phone-free spaces are a practical intervention precisely because willpower is insufficient against an environment engineered to capture attention — collective norms and physical boundaries work better than individual resolve.³ The practical implication for a family: make the play zone phone-free by default, not by heroic self-discipline in the moment.

What the Catholic anthropological tradition adds

The CCMMP framework, as developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, understands the human person as inherently relational at the level of creation — not as an isolated cognitive unit who then chooses to enter relationships, but as someone whose very formation depends on being encountered by another person. The child who is not touched, not played with, not seen in the act of play by a parent who is delighted, is not merely missing a developmental input. He or she is missing a primary context in which the self is confirmed as real, as good, and as capable.⁵

This is why Aquinas, in his treatment of the virtues in the Summa Theologiae, does not treat joy and play as trivial. The virtue of eutrapelia — the proper disposition toward play and recreation — is a real moral good, not a concession to weakness. The person who cannot play, who holds himself at a stiff distance from leisure and lightness, is not more virtuous for it. He is missing something. And his children are missing it with him.⁶

Physical play, in particular, exercises what Aquinas and Suazo would recognize as the cogitative sense — the capacity to read the particular situation in front of you, including another person's emotional state, as distinct from mere abstraction. The child learns to read their father, and the father learns to read the child. This is not soft developmental theory. It is the formation of a concrete perceptual skill.⁶

A working list of games worth playing

The following list prefers physical play, per the evidence on regulatory development, but includes constructive and imaginative options for variety. These are starter suggestions, not a curriculum.

Physical

Roughhousing on the living room floor, with agreed-upon stop signals

Chase games in the yard (simple tag, freeze tag, flashlight tag at night)

Pillow fights with the three-count warning that signals a throw is coming

Balance challenges: can the child cross the room without touching the floor?

Carry races: lift the child and run; toddlers find this reliably hilarious

Obstacle courses built from household furniture

Backyard wrestling with rules (no biting, tapping out stops the match)

Catch, throwing progression from soft foam to actual balls as coordination develops

Water balloon fights or garden hose battles in summer

Simple martial arts or gymnastics moves taught without equipment

Constructive

LEGO with an open brief: build me something surprising

Cardboard box engineering (tape, scissors, imagination)

Cooking something together where the child does a real step, not a ceremonial one

Simple woodworking: hammering nails into a soft log is satisfying for ages 4 and up

Kite building from scratch before flying it

Imaginative

Elaborate make-believe with the parent taking a subordinate role (the child is the captain; you are the crew)

Puppet shows built from socks

Storytelling games where each person adds one sentence

Map-drawing for imaginary worlds

Acting out scenes from books the child has heard

The common denominator across all of these is that the parent is present, responsive, and genuinely engaged — not supervising from the couch while glancing at a phone. Dale Carnegie observed decades ago that the deepest human need is to feel genuinely important to another person.⁷ A child who sees their father willing to be a pirate, or take a pillow to the face, or lose a wrestling match on purpose is receiving a message more direct than any praise: you are worth my undivided attention right now.

The argument in a sentence

The data from Ulfah's review, Panksepp's animal studies, and Haidt's synthesis of adolescent mental health all converge on the same point: play is not what children do while the real formation is happening elsewhere. Play is the formation. The father who gets on the floor is doing some of the most important developmental work available to him — and the cost of entry is just the willingness to look a little ridiculous.

Sources

[1] Ulfah, S.M. (2025). Father-child play interactions and child development: A review of physical, constructive, and imaginative play. International Journal of Education. https://doi.org/10.17509/ije.v18i1.60791

[2] Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. — Panksepp's foundational research on the PLAY system in the mammalian brain, including studies of play deprivation in juvenile rats and its effects on anxiety and exploratory behavior, is documented throughout this volume, particularly in Chapter 15.

[3] Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press. — Haidt synthesizes Panksepp's animal research on play deprivation and the resulting anxiety in mammals, and argues for collective, structural interventions (including phone-free norms) rather than individual willpower as the practical solution to attention capture. See Chapters 1–3 and 11.

[4] Peterson, J.B. Lecture on early childhood development and play. Available via Jordan B. Peterson YouTube channel. — Peterson describes his wife's difficulty transitioning into playful roughhousing due to limited play experience in her own childhood, used here to illustrate the self-consciousness barrier fathers and mothers may face.

[5] Vitz, P., Nordling, W., & Titus, C.S. (Eds.) (2020). A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration of Psychology and Philosophy within a Catholic Christian Anthropology. Divine Mercy University Press. — The CCMMP framework understands the human person as constitutively relational, formed through encounter with others from the beginning of life.

[6] Aquinas, T. Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 168. — Aquinas treats eutrapelia (the virtue of appropriate play and recreation) as a genuine moral good, arguing that the person incapable of rest and play is deficient in virtue, not superior to it.

[7] Carnegie, D. (1936). How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon & Schuster. — Carnegie's observation that the deepest human need is to feel genuinely important to another person appears throughout Part One of this work.