The Development of Play

Abstract

Play is a quintessential activity of childhood, the cognitive implications of which have generated longstanding theoretical and empirical interest. This chapter begins with the difficult issue of how to define play, then considers the two classic play theories, those of Piaget and Vygotsky. Next it covers varieties of play, from sensorimotor to physical, and from exploratory to symbolic, including the developmental course of each type. The bulk of the chapter concerns six current focal issues in play and cognitive development: (1) pretend play and theory of mind, (2) how children make sense of symbolic substitutions in pretend play, (3) constraints on object substitutions in children's play, (4) how children discriminate pretend from real, (5) how babies are initiated into pretend play, and (6) whether pretend play improves developmental outcomes. The next sections of the chapter address group differences in play by gender, developmental differences (visual and hearing impairments, autism), and culture, and the final section addresses future directions in play research.

“Let's make a place where giants live!”: Children's communication during play with siblings and friends from early to middle childhood

“…Finally, our analyses did not reveal any gender effects, which is in line with the literature on siblings' and friends' social and pretend play (DeHart, ; Howe et al, ; Leach et al, ; Leach, Howe, & DeHart, ; Lillard, ; Volling et al, ). As Lillard () argued, girls' and boys' particular toy preferences may be a defining factor in gender differences reported in the literature (e.g., McElwain & Volling, ). Perhaps our choice of neutral toys may have downplayed possible gender differences.…”

The role of shape and specificity in young children's object substitution

“…In object substitution, children use an object as something other than what it is (e.g., call a shell a hat or use a clipboard as a plate; Leslie, ; Lillard, ). In order to substitute one object for another, a child shows awareness of the purpose of each object, demonstrating an impressive understanding of things in their world.…”

Make-Believe in Gameful and Playful Design

“…Many scholars from Huizinga on (1949) view pretend play as the evolutionary and developmental origin of symbolic cognition, counterfactual reasoning, the arts, and meaning-making more generally (see Lillard et al 2011 for a critical review): in pretend play, children practice how to coordinate joint attention around objects and actions, and how to not reflexively react to them, but act based on jointly constituted functions and meanings. The rule play of games presents a later development of pretend play, where said alternative functions and meanings are formalized in the shape more or less explicit, not spontaneously renegotiable rules (Pellegrini 2009;Lillard 2014).…”

“…Pretend play has been mainly studied as a phenomenon of child development (Pellegrini 2009;Lillard 2014), capturing a stage and form of play where children re-enact or invent strips of events assembled from their surrounding life and media world. Thereby, they often also engage in role-play, pretend play entailing "social content", that is, enacting people and their roles.…”

“…And not just that: It combined the game with a little fiction of head-chomping urban fish, anchored in words ("Man-Eater") and a fish-shaped sticker. It produced make-believe,a fundamental form and aspect of human play and its appeal (Burghardt 2005;Lillard 2014;Pellegrini 2009). Man-Eater materializes for us adults to see what children naturally discover on the backseat of a car ride: that something quotidian like a rain drop running down a car window can be made engaging by wrapping its fate in a bit of pretence.…”