How children feel about themselves

Dressing up helps children to:

• Play imaginatively and be inventive
• Make up stories
• Explore different feelings while they play
• Learn to talk about their feelings and the things they like and dislike
• Begin to understand the roles and the feelings of the people they are pretending to be

Dressing up doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated.

Children often like to pretend to be grown up, so try to find old hats, handbags, purses, jewellery etc for a dressing up box. An old net curtain makes a good veil. A skirt cut in half can be a cape. A big white t-shirt can turn a child into a vet. You can use white strips of material to bandage toy animals. A strip of card can be sellotaped to fit your child’s head and decorated with feathers, shiny paper, cotton wool and felt pens to make all sorts of hats and headdresses. Necklaces and chains can be made by threading bottle tops and coloured cardboard tubes onto a length of string.