The Importance of Play in Child Development

The Importance of Play

• Play is essential to development, recognized by the UN as a right for every child.
• Preschool curricula are designed around pretend play due to its crucial importance for children's development.
• Play involves flexibility in form and duration, positive affect (enjoyment), non-literality (paradoxical literacy), and intrinsic motivation (voluntary engagement).

Types of Play

• Functional play: repeating motor actions on objects (Piaget, 1932).
• Construction play: building things (Piaget, 1932).
• Pretend/symbolic play: substituting an imagined world for reality (Piaget, 1932).
• Games with rules.

Core Features of Play

• Flexibility: occurs in various forms and lengths
• Positive affect: focuses on enjoyment
• Non-literality: paradoxical literacy (children don't do it to learn, but end up learning lots of things)
• Intrinsic motivation: voluntary engagement

Play in Infants (7-21 Months)

• Infants initially play with all objects in the same way.
• Play becomes more specialized during the second year.
• Infants engage in undifferentiated exploration, manipulation, mouthing, etc.
• Play trends related include: relational, functional, enactive naming, decontextualized pretense, pretend self, etc.

Functional Play: Functions about Objects

• Playing to resolve uncertainty (playing with new things/novelty preference).
• Playing to explore the unexpected.
• Influence of adult pedagogy (children's attention to others).
• Playing to discover the unseen.

Playing to Resolve Uncertainty

• Children enjoy new things.
• What if something they played with before left them uncertain about how it works?
• Are they motivated to resolve this uncertainty by further playing?

Playing to Explore the Unexpected

• Toddlers' play can seem unpredictable.
• But, toddlers have expectations about the world.
• When the world surprises them, they can figure out why.
• This exploration is evidenced by knowledge violations (solidity and support).

Playing to Discover & Pedagogy

• Children are naturally curious.
• They pay attention to others who might point out new things to discover.
• Children learn that objects/actions can be different, even if one is in an "accidental" condition.

Pedagogical Signals and Exploration

• 3- and 4-year-olds learn when objects are magnetic in certain conditions.
• Children explore objects differently in "accidental" vs. "intentional" or "pedagogical" conditions.
• Interactions in the "pedagogical" condition provide more insights for children to learn.

Pretend (Symbolic) Play

• "As If" stance (Garvey, 1990) - pretend play involves projecting a false reality.
• This involves complex projecting an alternative (Lillard, 1993).
• This involves meta-representation and linguistic skills.
• Children can collectively engage in "pretend," acting like different people (e.g., pretending to be different people or roles).
• Pretend play emerges around 12-15 months and peaks around 3-5 years.

Decontextualization and Imagination

• Early pretend play often involves realistic objects, but evolves over time to include non-realistic ones (e.g., using imagination to perform symbolic acts).
• By age 3, children tend to rely less on actual props (e.g., pretending to hold a phone).

Development of Pretend Play

• 18-month-olds begin with individual pretend acts (e.g., pretending to eat, drink).
• 2-3 year-olds engage in cooperative pretend.
• Children may coordinate fictional scenarios with others by age 3.

Three Views (on the relationship between pretense and Theory of Mind)

• Rich Account: Children are not egocentric and separate fiction from reality by 18-24 months; they are aware that others are pretending.
• Lean Account: Children behave as if without understanding the difference between fiction and reality (1993, 1998).
• We-intentionality account: Joint pretending is acting in accordance with "we" intentionality i.e., shared intentionality.

Methodological Issues

• Issues with confounding variables in research (e.g., confusing verbally demanding questions, counter-factual thinking).
• Play research should employ action-based methods (as opposed to verbally demanding ones).
• Examples of how research conditions can vary.

How Crucial is Pretend Play?

• Lillard et al's (2013) review suggests correlation with various developmental areas.
• Inconsistent results due to correlational studies and non-random assignment of children.
• Issues exist with the methodology; experiments sometimes aren't blind, which means potential bias.

Non-social aptitudes

• IQ tests, correlational studies suggest more intelligent children engage in pretend play more often.
• Training studies show similar effects like music training, possibly raising IQ scores equally.
• The causal direction is uncertain.

Nonsocial aptitudes: Reasoning

• Use logical syllogisms (e.g., dogs live in trees, Rex is a dog, does Reflex live in trees).
• Children must inhibit their real-life knowledge to solve pretend problems properly.
• Pretend play can improve reasoning about false premises.

Social aptitudes: Theory of Mind

• False belief understanding is comparable to pretending in the way that both are based on architecture.
• Through role-play, children step into someone else's shoes and pay attention to, and coordinate, the roles of others.

Symbolic Understanding: Language Development

• Pretend play mirrors linguistic development and uses symbolic representations. Kids that are better at pretend play at 1;0 are also better at vocabulary at 2;0- evidence suggests a correlation but not a cause/effect relation.
• Play studies show correlations but not causation, so there are other factors at play.

Summary

• Lillard et al's (2013) summary highlights play's correlation to aptitudes in various developmental areas.
• Training studies show that pretend play can boost aptitudes similar to other interventions like music training.

Cross Cultural Differences

• Cultural attitudes towards play vary.
• Mayan culture, for example, prioritizes chores over playtime, and children engage less in same-age peer play compared to other cultures.
• Play trajectories may differ across cultures.