Traditional and Digital Play in Early Childhood: Links with Emotion Regulation and Anxiety

This study examined the associations of traditional and digital play with emotion regulation and anxiety symptoms in early childhood within a Turkish sample. Data were collected through an online cross-sectional survey completed by 119 parents of typically developing children aged 3 to 7 years. Parents reported children’s and their own daily engagement in traditional play, digital play, and leisure online video watching, and completed measures of children’s emotion regulation and anxiety symptoms. Traditional play was common among children and parents, whereas digital play was generally of shorter duration. Greater child engagement in traditional play was associated with higher adaptive emotion regulation, lower emotional dysregulation, and lower generalised, separation, and total anxiety symptoms. Parent–child traditional play was positively related to adaptive regulation and negatively related to social anxiety. Children’s digital play was positively associated with adaptive regulation, whereas leisure online video watching was associated with higher emotional dysregulation. These findings highlight the potential importance of traditional play, and parental involvement in play, for children’s emotional well-being, while also suggesting that the implications of screen exposure may depend not simply on duration but on the nature of children’s screen-based activities.