The Growth of Play in Children

Play refers to activities that are pursued for their own sake, without any motivation other than the enjoyment they provide. The earliest play activities, such as banging spoons on high-chair trays, tend to be solitary. However, over the next few years, children's increasing understanding of other people contributes to play becoming more social, as well as more complex.

One early milestone in the development of play is the emergence of pretend play at around eighteen months of age. When engaged in pretend play, children act as if they were in a different situation than their actual one and often engage in object substitution, ignoring many of the play object's characteristics so that they can pretend it is something else. A child might slide a block along the floor saying “vroom, vroom," as if the block were a car, or cradle a pillow and talk to it, as if it were a baby.

About a year later, toddlers begin to engage in sociodramatic play, in which they enact miniature dramas with other children or adults, such as "mother comforting baby" or “doctor helping sick child." Sociodramatic play tends to be both more complex and more social than object substitution. Consider, for example, tea-party rituals, in which a child and parent "pour tea" for each other from an imaginary teapot, daintily “sip" it, "eat" imaginary cookies, and comment on how delicious they are. Young children's pretend play is typically more sophisticated when they are playing with a parent or older sibling, who can provide the structure for the play sequence, than when they are pretending with a peer.

Because play is such a universal and pervasive part of childhood, and because the form of children's play changes greatly during development, major theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky have speculated about its broader significance. In particular, they wondered whether pretend play and sociodramatic play simply reflect children's level of development or whether such play also advances their developmental level. Piaget (1928) believed that preschoolers' play reflects their general egocentrism (self-centeredness) — in the sense that preschoolers do not consider their playmates' perspectives when those perspectives might differ from their own. He also thought that it is only during the elementary school years, when play is increasingly governed by conventional rules, that play contributes to development. Vygotsky (1978) argued that toddlers' and preschoolers' pretend and sociodramatic play can help children act at higher levels within their zones of proximal development (that is, what the children can do on their own without assistance) and thus enhance their thinking. For example, when playing doctor and patient with a preschooler, a mother might provide clues to how her child should react to the doctor's questions, which might help the child answer questions appropriately on subsequent doctor visits.

Recent studies suggest that Vygotsky was right: young children's fantasy play not only reflects their understanding of other people's psychological functioning but also can cause that understanding to increase, The amount of fantasy play that young children engage in is positively related to their understanding of other people's thinking and predicts children's later understanding of their emotions. Fantasy play may lead toddlers and preschoolers to consider how various situations would make them or their play partner think and feel, and in this way increase their understanding of other people. Consistent with this hypothesis, children who participate in greater than average amounts of fantasy play with other children also tend to be relatively socially mature and popular with their peers, perhaps because such play enhances their understanding of other children's feelings. Language development and creativity in the preschool period also seem to be aided by fantasy play. Thus, although adults often view play as unimportant, it may enhance children's social and intellectual development.