Co-Play: Turning Pretend Play into Conversation

By the JMH Developers editorial team · Published: August 5, 2026 · Last reviewed: August 5, 2026 · About 7 min read.
Disclosure: JMH Developers publishes kids’ games, including titles linked in this guide.

A pretend-play game gets considerably more useful when you sit next to your child and talk while they play. The app supplies the props and the setting; you supply the words, the questions and the link back to the real world. Ten minutes of playing along tends to do more for a child's vocabulary than an hour of quiet solo tapping, because a screen can show a cavity or a shopping trolley but it cannot ask your child what they think is happening. Here is how to do that without turning play into a lesson.

Narrate what is happening on the screen

Most games built for two- to five-year-olds are deliberately wordless. There is no reading required, instructions are pictures, and the feedback is a sound or an animation. That design is right for the age group, but it leaves a gap: the child performs an action and never hears it named. Describing what you both see closes that gap.

Narration works best when it is specific rather than approving. "You're squeezing the ketchup onto the burger" gives your child a verb, a noun and a preposition. "Well done!" gives them nothing to reuse. Name the object and the action, then stop talking so your child can answer or carry on.

A few patterns that are easy to keep up:

• Name the tool before the result. "You picked up the little mirror" rather than "the tooth is clean now".
• Use the real word, not the baby word. Toothbrush, receipt, bandage, stethoscope, trolley, till. Children absorb these easily in context.
• Describe order. "First you washed the puppy, then you dried it, and now you're brushing it." Sequence words are hard to teach in the abstract and easy to hear in play.
• Say how the character feels. "He looks worried about the drill." Feeling words are the ones children have fewest of.
• Leave silence. Three or four seconds after a sentence is often when your child speaks.

The World Health Organization, in its guidance on activity and screen time for children under five, encourages reading and storytelling with a caregiver during the time a young child spends sitting. Narrated play sits close to that idea: the child is not alone with the screen, and language is part of the activity rather than an interruption to it.

Ask questions that open the conversation instead of closing it

Most questions adults ask during play are quiz questions with a known answer. "What colour is that?" "How many apples?" These have a place, but they end the exchange as soon as the child answers correctly, and they turn you into a tester. Questions that open a conversation have no answer key.

• Prediction: "What do you think the patient will say when he sees his new tooth?"
• Explanation: "Why does the shopping have to go on the belt before we can pay?"
• Preference with a reason: "Which cake would you choose for your birthday, and what's on top of it?"
• Problem-posing: "The kitten won't sit still. What could we try?"
• Role questions: "You're the dentist, so what should I do as the patient?"
• Extension: "And then what happened?" - the least sophisticated and most reliable question on the list.

If your child answers with one word, resist filling the pause. If they answer with a story that has nothing to do with the screen, follow the story. That drift is the point: the game is a starting position, not the subject.

Connect the scenario to something real

Pretend-play games are worth more when the pretending has a real counterpart your child has met or is about to meet. This is where pretend-play games for children earn their place next to physical toys: they rehearse ordinary situations that can be frightening or confusing the first time round.

The dentist. A friendly clinic scenario such as a dentist game for young children shows the chair, the light, the mirror and the tools before your child meets any of them in a waiting room. Play it a few days before the appointment, name the equipment, and let your child be the dentist while you are the nervous patient. Our wider set of doctor and dentist games covers check-ups and small treatments in the same register: nobody gets hurt, nothing fails.

The shop. A pretend supermarket like a shopping and supermarket game has a trolley, a scanner and a checkout. Afterwards, in a real shop, give your child the list, the job of finding two items, and the job of handing things to the cashier. The vocabulary rehearsed on screen - queue, scan, bag, change - arrives with a task attached.

The vet. If there is an animal in the house, a clinic scenario such as a kitten vet game maps directly onto brushing, feeding and the annual trip to the surgery. If there is no animal, it maps onto looking after a soft toy, which is nearly as good.

The transfer goes both ways: after a real trip, open the matching game and re-enact it; after the game, look for the real thing.

Hand control back and forth

Co-play collapses if one person holds the device the whole time. If you hold it, your child watches; if they hold it and you only comment, you are a spectator. Swapping is what makes it a conversation.

Simple ways to swap without a struggle: take one customer each in a shop or salon scenario; let your child do the doing and you do the choosing ("which patient next?"); or take the role the game does not show - you are the customer, the parent of the patient, the delivery driver. Because our games have no failure states, nothing is lost when the device changes hands mid-action. Our guide to mobile game controls for preschoolers explains why single-tap and short-drag interfaces survive being passed around.

End on a story beat, not a timer

Sessions that end because a timer went off end badly; sessions that end at a natural stopping point in the story usually end without protest. In a pretend-play game there is almost always a beat available: the patient walks out smiling, the cake is finished and served, the last customer leaves the shop, the puppy falls asleep.

Say the ending out loud a beat before it arrives - "let's serve this last customer and then close the shop" - and then close it together. If you need a hard stop for practical reasons, use the device controls rather than a countdown announced to the child. Apple Support documents Screen Time limits and Ask to Buy in its article on parental controls for a child's iPhone or iPad, and Google For Families Help explains daily limits in its guide to managing your child's screen time with Family Link. Set the boundary at the system level, and spend your own attention on the story instead of on the clock.

Co-play is a habit, not a rule

You will not sit down for every session, and you should not try to. Some days the game is what happens while you cook dinner, and that is a legitimate use of it. The aim is a habit that shows up often enough to matter: a couple of short co-played sessions a week is worth having, and the solo play in between does not cancel it out.

Guidance for families reflects this balance rather than a fixed quota; the American Academy of Pediatrics maintains a Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health that collects resources for families thinking about media use. Treat co-play the way you treat reading together: valuable, worth protecting, and not something to feel guilty about missing.

A short checklist for your next session

• Sit where you can both see the screen, and put your own phone somewhere else.
• Narrate the first two or three actions using real names for the tools.
• Ask one open question - prediction or explanation - and wait out the silence.
• Swap the device at least once, and take a role the game does not show.
• Name one real-life link: the appointment on Friday, the shop tomorrow, the cat in the hallway.
• Announce the ending as a story beat, then finish it together.
• Keep any overall limit at the system level, so the ending belongs to the story and not to an argument.