In an age of screens and structured activities, the simple joy of playing in a cubby house offers something increasingly rare and valuable: unstructured, imaginative outdoor play. But beyond being fun, cubby house play provides remarkable developmental benefits that contribute to children's physical health, cognitive growth, social skills, and emotional wellbeing. Understanding these benefits helps us appreciate why outdoor play spaces are an investment in our children's futures, not just their entertainment.
Physical Development Benefits
The physical benefits of outdoor play are perhaps the most obvious, but they extend far beyond simple exercise. When children play in and around a cubby house, they engage multiple physical systems in ways that structured activities often don't replicate.
Gross Motor Skills
Climbing into a cubby, navigating steps, ducking through doorways, and moving around the play space all develop gross motor skills—the large muscle movements essential for everyday activities. For cubbies with slides, climbing walls, or elevated platforms, the physical challenges are even greater, building strength, coordination, and balance.
These movements also develop proprioception—the sense of where your body is in space. Children who regularly engage in active outdoor play typically show better body awareness and coordination than their peers who spend more time in sedentary activities.
Fine Motor Skills
The imaginative play that cubbies encourage also develops fine motor skills. Children might "cook" in a play kitchen (manipulating small items), draw on a cubby chalkboard, operate latches and door handles, or engage in craft activities within their private space. These precise hand movements build the muscle control needed for later tasks like writing and using tools.
âś“ Physical Skills Developed Through Cubby Play
- Balance and coordination
- Strength and endurance
- Spatial awareness
- Fine motor precision
- Cardiovascular fitness
- Flexibility and agility
Sensory Development
Outdoor play engages all the senses in ways indoor play rarely can. Children feel the texture of timber or plastic, smell the outdoors, hear birds and wind, see natural light and shadows, and experience temperature variations. This rich sensory environment supports healthy sensory processing development, which is foundational to learning and behaviour regulation.
Cognitive Development Benefits
While physical benefits are visible, the cognitive advantages of cubby house play are equally significant. Imaginative play is recognised by developmental psychologists as a crucial driver of intellectual growth.
Imagination and Creativity
A cubby house is a blank canvas for imagination. Today it might be a home, tomorrow a shop, next week a spaceship or a castle. This type of pretend play—what researchers call "symbolic play"—is fundamental to cognitive development. When a child pretends a stick is a magic wand or a cubby is a hospital, they're practicing abstract thinking—the ability to let one thing represent another.
This mental flexibility is a precursor to later academic skills. The child who can imagine a cardboard box as a car is developing the same cognitive processes they'll later use to understand that letters represent sounds or that numbers represent quantities.
Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking
Unstructured play presents constant small problems to solve. How do we fit everyone in the cubby? What can we use as pretend money for our shop? How do we make the cubby into a better pirate ship? Working through these challenges builds problem-solving skills and encourages flexible thinking.
Research shows that children who engage in regular imaginative play demonstrate better divergent thinking—the ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem—compared to children whose play is more structured and directed.
đź’ˇ The Power of "Pretend"
Studies have shown that children who engage in rich pretend play score higher on tests of executive function—the mental processes that help us plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks. These skills are strong predictors of academic success and life outcomes.
Language Development
Imaginative play is intensely verbal. Children narrate their play, negotiate roles, explain scenarios, and create dialogue for pretend characters. A child playing "shop" might practice greeting customers, describing products, counting money, and resolving complaints—all building vocabulary, sentence structure, and conversational skills.
When children play together, the language benefits multiply. They must communicate clearly to maintain the shared fiction, learn to listen and respond to others' ideas, and develop the social language needed for collaboration.
Social Development Benefits
Cubby houses are natural gathering places for social play, providing rich opportunities for children to develop the interpersonal skills they'll use throughout their lives.
Cooperation and Teamwork
Group play in a cubby requires constant negotiation and cooperation. Children must agree on the game, assign roles, establish rules, and adapt when things don't go as planned. These are the same skills that adults need for successful workplace collaboration, but children learn them naturally through play.
The confined space of a cubby also teaches physical cooperation—sharing space, taking turns, and being mindful of others' bodies and belongings.
Conflict Resolution
Where there's social play, there's conflict. Someone wants to be the shop owner, but so does someone else. The game isn't going the way one child imagined. Someone knocked over the carefully arranged tea party. These small conflicts are valuable learning opportunities.
Through experience, children learn to express their needs, listen to others' perspectives, compromise, and find solutions that work for everyone. Adults can support this learning by allowing children to work through conflicts themselves when safe to do so, stepping in only when needed to guide (not dictate) resolution.
Empathy and Perspective-Taking
Role-playing is essentially practice in perspective-taking. When a child pretends to be a parent, doctor, or shopkeeper, they must imagine how that person thinks, feels, and behaves. This builds empathy—the ability to understand others' emotions and viewpoints.
Research indicates that children who engage in extensive pretend play show greater empathy and better ability to understand others' mental states compared to children with less imaginative play experience.
Emotional Development Benefits
Perhaps less obviously, cubby house play significantly supports children's emotional health and development.
Emotional Regulation
Play provides a safe space for children to experience and practice managing emotions. The excitement of a game, the frustration when things go wrong, the joy of shared laughter—all these emotional experiences in a low-stakes environment help children develop emotional regulation skills.
Imaginative play also allows children to process difficult experiences. A child anxious about a doctor's visit might play doctor repeatedly, gaining mastery over their fears through symbolic representation. A child dealing with a new sibling might work through their feelings by playing families.
Independence and Confidence
A cubby house is a child's domain—a space where they're in charge. This sense of ownership and autonomy is important for developing independence and self-confidence. Children make decisions about their cubby, organise it according to their preferences, and host others in their space.
For children who spend much of their day following adult directions at school and home, having a space and time where they direct their own activities is psychologically valuable.
⚠️ The Importance of Unstructured Play
To gain maximum developmental benefit, cubby play should be largely child-directed. Adults can provide the space and materials, ensure safety, and occasionally join in when invited, but the play itself should flow from children's own imaginations rather than adult-planned activities.
Stress Relief and Mental Health
Outdoor play is a natural stress reliever. Physical activity releases endorphins, natural light supports healthy circadian rhythms and mood regulation, and imaginative play provides an escape from daily pressures. In our increasingly busy world, the simple act of playing outside in a cubby offers children a restorative break.
Studies consistently show that children with regular access to outdoor play spaces show better mental health outcomes, including lower rates of anxiety and depression, compared to children with limited outdoor play opportunities.
Supporting Development Through Play
Understanding these benefits can help parents maximise the developmental value of cubby house play:
- Allow unstructured time: Resist the urge to direct play. Let children lead.
- Provide open-ended props: Simple items like blankets, boxes, and natural materials spark more creativity than single-purpose toys.
- Facilitate social play: Invite friends over to play in the cubby when possible.
- Be available but not intrusive: Stay nearby for safety but let children problem-solve independently.
- Value the process: Focus on the play experience rather than any "product" or outcome.
- Make time for play: In busy schedules, protect time for free outdoor play.
An Investment in the Future
A cubby house might look like a simple backyard structure, but it's really an investment in your child's development across every domain—physical, cognitive, social, and emotional. The hours children spend playing in their cubby are building the skills, capabilities, and mental health foundations they'll carry into adulthood.
In a world that increasingly rushes children from one structured activity to another, perhaps the greatest gift we can give them is time and space for the simple, profound act of play.