Seeing your child alone in a corner on an open day at nursery is a sinking feeling. But playing alone is not, in itself, usually a problem. Play has a developmental sequence, and what is natural differs by age.

Play develops in a sequence

Children's social play is classically described in the following stages. The ages are rough guides and vary a great deal between children.

• Unoccupied and onlooker — not playing, but watching. Observing other children is part of learning too.
• Solitary play — absorbed in their own play, independently of the children around them.
• Parallel play — sitting side by side, each playing separately. Same space, similar toys, but no cooperation. Common at two to three years old.
• Associative play — playing the same game, exchanging words and sharing toys, though roles are loosely defined.
• Cooperative play — setting goals and rules and dividing up roles. Usually becomes clear from four to five years old.

The stage most often misread is parallel play. To an adult it looks like "not playing together", but from the child's point of view it is the stage of practising being next to other children. Cooperative play does not appear straight away with this stage skipped.

Stages do not disappear

There is another fact worth knowing, and it is a reassuring one: moving to a later stage does not make the earlier ones go away. A five-year-old who is good at cooperative play will still get absorbed in building blocks alone. Solitary play is also the time in which concentration and self-regulation grow.

So the question to ask is not "does the child play alone?" but "does the child only play alone?", and "how do they respond when the chance to join other children comes up?"

Two situations that need telling apart

They look similar, but the help each needs is different.

1. Little interest in the first place — rarely responds to their own name, does not look up when another child approaches, holds eye contact only briefly. Here the order of business is checking development more broadly, rather than teaching play skills.

2. Interested, but does not know how — keeps watching the other children and wants to join in, but hesitates because they do not know how to break in. Or their approach is clumsy — grabbing a toy, suddenly pushing — and they get rebuffed. What is needed here is being shown a concrete method.

What to teach a child who does not know how

"Go and play with your friends" is an instruction, not a method. Handing the child a sentence works better.

• An opening line — "Can I play too?" Practise that one sentence in advance.
• How to wait — when they have to wait their turn, work through what waiting looks like together.
• When they are turned down — show them that a refusal is not the end. "They said not now, so let's do something else and ask again later."
• Start with one — rather than dropping them into a group, arrange a short play session with a single child. Successful experiences accumulate at a different rate.
• Let an adult model it. A parent taking a role and playing alongside the child is practice for playing with peers.

In summary

Playing side by side at two to three years old is a normal stage. Cooperative play generally becomes clear from four to five. What to check is not whether the child plays alone but whether they are interested in other children — and if they are, what they need is not worry but one sentence to get in with. To look at this alongside language development, see the other articles in Early Development.