Understanding Your Child’s Cognitive Strengths Through Their Favorite Games

What Games Reveal About How Your Child Thinks

It doesn’t matter whether it’s LEGO castles, Minecraft creations, or playing teacher with stuffed animals—your child’s favorite games are not random. They’re windows into how your child sees the world, processes information, and solves problems.

As parents, especially when we’re dealing with homework resistance, school-related stress, or undiagnosed learning struggles, we often focus so much on deficits that we miss opportunities to spot strengths. But during play, when there’s no pressure or performance anxiety, your child’s genuine cognitive preferences shine through.

This matters, because when we understand how our child learns best, we can adapt not only homework routines but also our expectations and support systems to fit their brain—instead of forcing their brain to fit the school mold.

The Architect, The Storyteller, and The Strategist

Take Anna, for example, an 8-year-old who struggles with reading comprehension and avoids writing assignments. Her parents were understandably anxious. But when they started observing her during play, they noticed she would spend hours building intricate worlds from cardboard boxes, labeling them, and narrating how the characters moved through them.

What they didn’t see before was that Anna is a spatial learner with a flair for storytelling. She struggles with extracting meaning from a page, yet creates story arcs fluidly in pretend play. What looked like a weakness in the classroom was actually an untapped strength waiting to be redirected.

The key is noticing patterns:

• The Architect: drawn to building games, puzzles, organizing toys, or coding logic. This child may excel in visual-spatial reasoning or problem-solving but may struggle with verbal instructions. For these children, step-by-step written instructions may need to be broken into visual tasks or diagrams.
• The Storyteller: thrives in role-play, pretend scenarios, or storytelling apps. These children often learn best through narrative and imagination. If they resist traditional study methods, try a more playful and immersive approach to learning.
• The Strategist: obsessed with board games, card games, or turn-based video games. They think in systems and rules and may benefit from structured logic but might push back against less defined tasks like creative writing.

Translating Play Preferences Into Learning Support

Once you identify what type of mental engagement your child naturally gravitates toward, it becomes easier to redesign their learning approach. For example:

• A child who loves building might benefit from using diagrams and models when learning math or reading science texts.
• A budding storyteller can benefit from turning academic content into plots or audio adventures. In fact, combining this with tools that personalize the learning experience—like transforming a written history lesson into an audio adventure where your child becomes the hero—can leverage their imagination while reinforcing knowledge in a non-threatening way. (That’s exactly what the Skuli app now allows you to do in just a few taps.)
• Strategists may need assignments gamified, incorporating clear rules and goals. Turning review questions into challenges or missions can help these learners stay engaged. You can explore more ways to turn homework into a game here.

The biggest shift comes when we stop seeing school resistance as laziness and start interpreting it as a signal: “This way of learning doesn’t work for me.” Games are often the clearest way children express their cognitive preferences, especially when they lack the language to say what feels hard or boring.

Discovering Learning Styles Beyond Labels

You might have come across learning styles like auditory, visual, or kinesthetic—but learning preferences are more nuanced than simple categories. Take Leo, a 10-year-old who hated reading aloud but devoured audiobooks. His parents initially resisted the idea of swapping reading for listening, worrying he’d fall behind. But when they finally tried transforming his lessons into audio during car rides, something clicked. He remembered more and stressed less.

That’s because his brain required auditory processing to engage. You can learn more about the benefits of audio learning, especially for struggling readers and neurodivergent learners.

Labels can be useful, but staying curious and observant usually yields better results. Whenever your child is immersed in play, step back and ask yourself:

• What problem are they solving?
• What kind of thinking does this activity require?
• What emotions does it bring out—excitement, frustration, curiosity?

Aligning Strengths With School Success

To be clear, not every child’s favorite game can easily be molded into learning. That's not the point. The goal is to understand your child well enough that you start designing homework and learning tools with them in mind—not as a battle, but as an extension of the way they already engage with the world.

Once you know your child is a visual-sequential thinker, or a narrative-driven learner, or thrives through movement and logic, you can build a toolbox around those preferences. That might mean incorporating storytelling into science, rewriting list-based tasks as treasure hunts, or listening to a lesson while jumping on a trampoline.

Motivation often follows recognition. When a child realizes, "I'm not bad at learning, I just learn differently," their confidence starts to grow. You can explore how motivation and mindset fuel academic growth, especially when children feel their strengths are seen and valued.

Personalized learning, whether through home strategies or educational tools, offers far more than convenience—it validates a child’s unique brain. If you're curious about how this impacts long-term outcomes, read more about why personalized learning works.

Final Thoughts for the Tired, Devoted Parent

If you’re reading this after another night of tears over math or another note from the teacher about unfinished work, take heart. Your child is not broken. Often, the frustration is just a mismatch between how they think and how they’re being asked to learn.

So start with play. Learn your child’s language—their silly Minecraft metaphors, their endless pretend classroom games, or the way they sort their Pokémon by type. Each game is a clue. And when you follow those clues, you just might uncover exactly what your child needs to thrive, not just at home but inside every classroom too.