Hello to all of Penny’s readers! My name is Matthew, I’m the writer and researcher for Puzumi. We’re a puzzle company that prides itself on creating puzzles that help people train their brain, sharpen their skills and let folks have fun while doing this!

A big focus of mine of late has been looking at how puzzles impact children during their development. From their earliest moments when they begin using puzzles that are simple cutouts of basic shapes, to more complex puzzles which are outlines of animals and everyday objects, to complex jigsaw puzzles and finally reaching a point where they can complete one of our complex packing puzzles.

When I first started talking to Penny, I became interested in looking at how puzzles would impact a multi-child home. As you should know from reading her blog, she has two children. One who likes to play with her puzzles (sometimes to comedic effect!) and another who is a puzzle lover in training.  This is very true, Matthew!!

To figure this out we’ll have to first look at what we know to be the benefits of puzzles during early childhood development for a single child. I looked at this for a post over on Teach.com, I’ll summarize it below:

●     Physical skills: developing your child’s ability to manipulate objects by moving puzzle pieces until they fit into the given space.

●     Cognitive skills: developing your child’s problem solving skills and ability to remember shapes.

●     Emotional skills: teaching your child patience and giving them a reward for that patience. Puzzles are a sit and think activity, they are not like sports which are mostly pure instinct.

As you can see, puzzles have a number of benefits for single children working on them alone. But what about when you have two holy terrors, I mean, lovely young children, like Penny will once her younger one gets a little bit older?

Puzzles, when they’re used by two children at once, begin to enter the same territory as sports when it comes to childhood development – with fewer bruises! I wrote about the 3 main benefits of sports (soccer, to be specific) for children over on Our Kids Media a year or so ago, but the ideas still apply:

●     Physical benefits: growing the strength of their body and developing their ability to use their body

●     Social skills: teaching teamwork, encouraging communication skills to develop

●     Instilling the ideals of equality: success is earned through work, not given to any particular race, religion or ethnicity

Sports are great at this, but how do sport skills and puzzle skills cross over when we’re looking at a multi-child puzzle solution environment?

Take a look at the benefits that I highlighted as ‘Emotional skills’ under puzzles, and ‘Social skills’ under sports. They’re the same basic skill sets. Puzzles can help your children develop those important skills right in the comfort of your own home, along with the other two which are developed while working on the puzzle alone.

All of this with no cuts, no bruises and no wins or loses – just your children working together to develop their social and emotional skills, solve a puzzle and have some fun outside of a video game environment.

A further skill that I believe can be highlighted by having your children work on puzzles together is that of the learning of patience. Have you ever helped someone with a puzzle and tried to get them to put a puzzle piece in one place, but they didn’t quite understand or agree with you? Patience is learned or the yelling starts!

I’d like to turn it over at this point to Penny to allow her to comment on what she hopes puzzles can do for her children as they grow up together, and any opinions she has on how it has helped her family already.

Keep on being puzzled!