Your child was born with about 100 billion brain cells. As if that's not amazing enough, now that he's a toddler each of those brain cells sends and receives electrical signals, creating connections between them. Through repetition, these connections turn into networks that allow your child to think and learn.
The first three years of your child's life is so important because everything he does with you – from playing to eating, walking, reading, and singing – helps jump-start his brain. By the time your child reaches the age of 3, his brain will grow to have 1,000 trillion connections.
As you expose your toddler to new sights, sounds, and sensations, you open his mind to a bigger, more exciting world. And when you use your imagination with him – "Look, I'm a tiger in the jungle!" or "Let's pretend we're going to Grandma's house" – you spur his brain to forge "imagination pathways" of its own.
Because your toddler is just learning to speak, it can be hard to know what she's thinking. But you can see glimmers of imagination when she imitates the things she sees around her (a behavior that emerges around the age of 18 to 20 months). Your toddler might copy the things you're doing, mimic her own daily routine by pretending to feed her stuffed bear or put it down for a nap, or act like the family dog.
An active imagination helps your toddler down the road in more ways than you might think.
Communication: Children who play imaginary games or listen to lots of fairy tales, books, or stories spun by those around them tend to have noticeably better communication skills. You may not see the fruits of these activities until your toddler's vocabulary grows in the coming year, but you're laying the foundation for it now.
Self-control: Pretending allows your toddler to be anyone he wants, explore negative emotions, practice things he's learned, and make situations turn out the way he wants them to. Stories in which the three little pigs thwart the big bad wolf, or imaginary games in which your child's teddy bear submits to a bath, give your child a sense that he can be powerful and in control, even in unfamiliar or scary situations.
Problem-solving: Dreaming up imaginary situations teaches your child to think creatively, which can be an asset in solving problems. A study conducted at Case Western Reserve University found that children who are imaginative when they're young tend to keep this quality as they get older and become better problem solvers. Tested later in life, early "imaginators" had more resources to draw on when it came to coping with challenges and difficult situations, such as what to do if they forgot a book they needed for school that day.