This article explores how playing dress-up develops a child´s imagination, and helps them make sense of their world. Suggestions are also offered to enable parents on a tight budget to begin building a dress-up wardrobe at minimal expense.

In a time when most children, and most adults, in the western world take the speedy access to information and entertainment offered by the world wide web for granted, it can come as a shock to parents to discover that their toddler is enchanted by the thoroughly low tech game known as dress-up. Like the cardboard box transformed into a spaceship, or two pot lids clanged together to form a one-child percussion section, mommy or daddy´s old clothing can be the means by which a little one may leave the confines of their everyday life and become, if only for a while, someone else. They can cast themselves in the role of princess, vampire, police officer, firefighter, truck driver…the list is endless.

Certainly, a game of dress-up is rife with possibilities for exploration. The only limits imposed are those of the child´s imagination. Toddlers can let loose and revel in the joy of immersing themselves in a fantasy world where they can be anyone or anything, and the only rules are the ones they make themselves.

Let´s say a three year old boy wants to pretend to be a ghost. He may be fascinated by ghosts, or afraid of them. Perhaps he has heard stories about ghosts and doesn´t quite know what to make of them. He goes into the linen closet, grabs a white sheet, and wraps himself in it. Whatever his own feelings or fears about specters, he now has a chance to make himself into that which he has wondered about. He can take charge, and be as spooky or as sweet a ghost as he chooses to be, and by doing so give voice to the unspoken feelings he has about something he doesn´t fully understand. He can articulate his thoughts this way in spite of the fact that he may not have the language to do so yet.

Maybe a two year old girl imagines herself as a cashier in a supermarket. She has been grocery shopping with her mother before, and knows that there are people who stand at something called a till passing items over a little black square and talking to customers. Best of all, they get to take money from people! With an old suit jacket, and perhaps a paper name tag made by mommy or daddy, she is ready to be “the lady” at the cash register. She can imagine what it´s like to be a grownup in the big world, and play at being someone she has perhaps seen many times and wondered about.

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