Two days a week, Kevin leaves his office 45 minutes early to take charge of his 2-year-old daughter, Sophie, while her mother, a university professor, teaches a late class. One balmy spring afternoon, Kevin retrieved Sophie at her child-care center and drove the 15-minute route home. Invited to look in on Sophie’s play, I met the pair at the front door and nestled into a rocking chair from which to observe unobtrusively.
After downing the last bite of her snack, Sophie grabbed Kevin’s hand and led him across the family room to a rug lined on two sides by shelves filled with books, stuffed animals, and other play props. Sophie moved a toy horse and cow inside a small, enclosed fence that she and Kevin had put together the day before. Then she turned the animals on their sides and moved them toward each other.
“Why are horse and cow lying down?” Kevin asked.
“’Cause they’re tired,” Sophie answered, pushing the two animals closer together.
“Oh, yes,” Kevin affirmed. Then, building on Sophie’s theme, he placed a teddy bear on another part of the rug and offered, “I think Ted’s tired, too. I’m going to start a bed over here for some other animals.”
Sophie turned toward the teddy bear, lifted his paw, and exclaimed, “She wants a lollipop to hold in her hand!”
“A lollipop in her hand? We haven’t got any lollipops, have we?” answered Kevin.
“Laura has!” declared Sophie, glancing at me.
“Has Laura got a lollipop?” Kevin queried.
“Yes! She’s got all of those, and a swing and a table, too!” Sophie remarked, referring to my chair, which rocked back and forth next to an end table.
“Maybe this could be a make-believe lollipop,” suggested Kevin, placing a round piece on the end of a long TinkerToy stick and handing the structure to Sophie
“That’s a lollipop,” agreed Sophie, placing it in the paw of the teddy bear.
“Can she suck that while she’s going off to sleep?” asked Kevin. “Do you think that’s what she wants?”
“It’s a pacifier,” explained Sophie, renaming the object.
“A pacifier, do you think? The pacifier might help her get to sleep,” Kevin confirmed.
“This long, long pacifier,” Sophie answered, picking up the TinkerToy structure, looking at its long stick, and pausing as if to decide what to do next.
“Leprechaun is looking pretty tired,” suggested Kevin, laying Sophie’s stuffed leprechaun next to the teddy bear. “What do you think?”
“He wants a lollipop, too!”
“Oh, he wants a lollipop as well. What are we going to use for a lollipop for the leprechaun?” asked Kevin.
Pressing the teddy bear’s and the leprechaun’s arms together and the lollipop-turned-pacifier between them, Sophie readily came up with a solution. “He’s sharing,” she affirmed.
“Oh, they’ll share! All right,” Kevin agreed.
This scene is but a small excerpt from Sophie and Kevin’s joint play session, which persisted for more than an hour—a remarkably long time for a 2-year-old to sustain any activity. Yet when the TV set is switched off and children are free to do as they choose, most preschoolers readily become absorbed in pretending. At times, their involvement is so intense that on being interrupted they react with shock and dismay, rejecting an adult who otherwise would be welcomed with joy and affection. One mother reported to me that her daughter Mattie reserved the period after she awoke in the morning for conversing with dolls and other imaginary characters. If a parent entered too soon to help her wash and dress, she dismissed the intruder, proclaiming sharply, “Busy! Don’t stop my dollies!” Only smooth and clever entry into the make-believe activity—for example, inviting the dolls and stuffed animals to get up for breakfast—could lure Mattie into starting the “real” part of her day without protest.
The years of early childhood are often called the high season of imaginative play, and aptly so, since make-believe blossoms during this time, evolving from simple, imitative acts into highly elaborate, imaginative plots involving complex coordination of roles. Eminent child development theorists of the past attached great importance to the role of make-believe play in early development. All were convinced that anything so compelling and engrossing in the life of the young child must be profoundly significant.
the role of make-believe play in children’s lives
Among influential explanations of why preschoolers are so drawn to pretending, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and Piaget’s cognitive theory held sway for much of the twentieth century. Although each has made valuable contributions to our understanding, a new, more powerful view of the meaning of young children’s play has arrived on the scene, thanks to Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory.
The Psychoanalytic View: Wish Fulfillment and Insight into Social Roles
Freud regarded make-believe play as a form of pleasurable wish fulfillment that allows children to act out uncertainties, anxieties, and hoped for outcomes and, therefore, to master frightening and frustrating events. Young children, Freud noted, often revisit anxiety-provoking experiences, such as a trip to the doctor’s office or discipline by a parent, but with roles reversed so the child is in command and compensates for unpleasant happenings. Sophie’s parents, aware of the previous day’s events, might have judged her pretend focus on bedtime, lollipops, and pacifiers to contain at least an element of wish fulfillment. The evening before, they had told her, “Only one lolly from the candy dish,” and she had complained at having to go to bed while her parents continued to talk and laugh with their guests.
Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson built on Freud’s vision, expanding his picture of make-believe. According to Erikson, children draw on fantasy play to find out about themselves and their social world.1 In all cultures, children act out family roles and highly visible occupations—police officer, doctor, and nurse in our society; rabbit hunter and potter among the Hopi Indians; and hut builder and spear maker among the Baka of West Africa.2 As they do so, they enter a small social organization whose members must cooperate to achieve common goals. And through observing and emulating admired adult figures, preschoolers internalize social norms and gain a sense of their future, of what they can become and how they can contribute to society.
Piaget’s View: Exercising a New Symbolic Capacity
Piaget acknowledged the emotional function of play, and he agreed that through pretending, children become familiar with social-role possibilities. But he is best known for stressing the symbolic nature of make-believe. Pretending, Piaget pointed out, is a vital means of mentally representing the world that, along with gestures, language, and drawings, develops rapidly in early childhood. Through it, children practice and strengthen their capacity to represent their experiences.3 For example, when Sophie pretended to put the animals to bed and used a TinkerToy to stand for a lollipop, she represented in her mind what formerly she could experience only directly—by going to bed or sucking a lollipop. Practicing and solidifying modes of representation, Piaget emphasized, make it possible for the child to free thought from the here and now; create larger images of reality that take into account past, present, and future; and transform those images mentally in the service of logical thinking.
Nevertheless, Piaget was convinced that by itself, make-believe play does little to advance children’s development. Rather, children merely exercise playfully the symbols they have acquired in other contexts.4 Much like his view of private speech as egocentric and nonsocial, Piaget believed that at first pretend play is a solitary activity in which the child uses highly personal symbols that cannot easily be interpreted by others. Sociodramatic play, involving joint make-believe with a partner, Piaget claimed, is not under way until age 3. As with other aspects of Piaget’s theory, the direction of development for make-believe is from purely individual, egocentric symbols to social play and shared understanding.
Yet think back to 2-year-old Sophie’s pretending. Sophie is socially engaged throughout! From the start, she draws Kevin into the activity, explains her pretend actions so he can build on them, and responds cooperatively and appropriately to Kevin’s suggestions, as he does to hers. Vygotsky’s theory has been the wellspring of our recent appreciation of the profoundly social nature of even very young children’s imaginative play—and its wide-ranging influence on cognitive and social development.
Vygotsky’s View: A Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky viewed make-believe play as crucial in children’s learning.5 He regarded it as a unique, broadly influential “zone” in which children try out a wide variety of challenging skills and acquire many culturally valued competencies. Consider the following frequently quoted remarks, taken from a brief lecture in which Vygotsky eloquently summed up his conviction that pretend play is a central force in children’s development:
[Make-believe] play creates a zone of proximal development in the child. In play, the child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in condensed form and is itself a major source of development.6
Why did Vygotsky say that make-believe play creates a “zone” in which the child is “a head taller than himself”? If we stop every now and then to watch children at play, we can see what Vygotsky meant. Recall how Sophie satisfied both teddy bear’s and leprechaun’s desire for a lollipop, when just one TinkerToy lollipop was available. She had them share, a very mature response for a 2-year-old. In everyday life, Sophie, like many Western children her age, finds sharing to be difficult.
As another illustration, consider 5-year-old David, who has trouble sitting still during group storytime in kindergarten. He leans over and talks to the other children. In spite of the teacher’s frequent prompting, he can’t stay seated for more than a couple of minutes. But when David plays school with several of his friends, he can sit and pay attention for much longer—perhaps as long as 10 minutes. Play provides the roles, rules, and scenarios that enable David to concentrate at a much higher level than he typically does in nonpretend contexts.
unique features of make-believe play
How do the make-believe scenes just described, and others like them, serve as major sources of development? To answer this question, Vygotsky pointed out, we must identify the distinctive features of make-believe play—those that make it unique among young children’s experiences.
The widespread belief, originating with Freud, that play is pleasurable wish fulfillment characterizes certain playful pursuits—for example, acting out high-status roles, such as doctor, parent, or teacher, and thereby exercising authority over others instead of being directed and controlled. But not all fantasy qualifies as wish fulfillment. In the sociodramatic scenarios that young children create, a doctor must have patients to inoculate, a parent must have children to discipline, and a teacher must have pupils to do assignments. Make-believe roles are not equally pleasurable—a feature of cooperation that is as true in everyday life as it is in fantasy play.
Even when make-believe does fulfill a child’s wishes, such pleasure is not unique to play. Many other activities, such as eating a favorite treat, being granted the undivided attention and affection of a parent, and listening to an exciting story, are at least as gratifying and sometimes more so than pretending. Indeed, imaginative wish fulfillment can, at times, be counterproductive. In well-known research on children’s ability to delay gratification, psychologist Walter Mischel and his collaborators showed preschoolers some delicious marshmallows and told them that they could have one now or several if they waited until later. Children who spent the waiting period in a wish-fulfillment mode, thinking about what it would be like to eat those tasty marshmallows, were far less likely to wait patiently and successfully than children who turned their attention away from the treats and thought about other things.7 In this situation and others, being caught up in fantasized wish fulfillment interferes with attaining larger, more rewarding outcomes in real life—ones that would have been realized had the child been able to exercise imaginative self-restraint.
What about Piaget’s belief that through make-believe, young children solidify their new symbolic capacity? A burgeoning ability to use symbols certainly contributes to the emergence of make-believe, and (as we’ll soon see) make-believe does much to extend young children’s symbolic skills. Nevertheless, mental representation is yet another feature that is not exclusive to play. As we have already noted, it also characterizes gestures, language, and artistic pursuits as well as beginning literacy—preschoolers’ first efforts to make sense of written symbols.
Vygotsky concluded that make-believe play has two crucial features that distinguish it from other childhood activities. First, the creation of imaginary situations in play helps children separate internal ideas from the objects and events for which they stand. Once young children realize that words, gestures, and other symbols are distinct from external reality, they are well on the way to using those representations as effective mental tools, calling on them to overcome impulses. Second, a careful look at children’s pretend scenarios reveals that make-believe play is, above all, rule-based play. Inspired by experiences in their families and communities, children continually devise and follow social rules in imaginary situations. In doing so, they strive to bring their behavior in line with social expectations and acquire the rules of social life.
Consider these unique, complementary ingredients of make-believe. The first strengthens children’s internal capacity to become civilized and socially responsible. The second provides children with powerful external pressures to act in socially desirable ways. Together, these features make fantasy play a supreme contributor to the development of self-regulation—one that extends the impact of adult teaching and example more than any other early childhood activity. To understand make-believe play’s role in development, let’s take a closer look at each of its unique features.
Overcoming Impulsive Action
Fantasy play makes its appearance in the second year of life, a time when children must start to suppress impulses and accept that certain desires will remain unsatisfied. In infancy, most of the child’s wants—for food, stimulation, affection, and comfort—are gratified quickly. Such prompt satisfaction grants babies the security that their basic needs will be met. As a result, they do not have to be preoccupied with those needs and, instead, can turn their attention outward, toward acquiring physical, cognitive, and social skills. Warm, responsive caregiving also promotes a view of parents as kind and compassionate—an outlook essential for motivating children to emulate and take direction from parents.
Between 1 and 2 years of age, children begin to acquire language, greater understanding of the consequences of their actions, and the ability to comply with others’ requests and directives. Consequently, caregivers’ expectations change. They increasingly insist that children engage in socially appropriate conduct. During the very period in which children must learn to subordinate their desires to social life, imaginative play flourishes. For Vygotsky, this synchrony between socialization and make-believe is no coincidence. Pretend play fortifies children’s capacity to use ideas to guide behavior. The young, immature child runs after a ball that rolls into the street, without considering consequences; drops toys on the spot when another activity engages her; and grabs an attractive object from a playmate, without regard for the playmate’s rights and feelings. Make-believe play, Vygotsky asserted, helps preschoolers conquer these impulses by granting the child repeated practice “in acting independently of what he sees.”8
Just how does imaginative play help children distinguish ideas from the enticing stimuli around them and use thought to guide behavior? According to Vygotsky, the object substitutions that permeate children’s make-believe are crucial in this process. While pretending, children continually use one object to represent another. By making a TinkerToy stand for a lollypop or a folded blanket stand for a sleeping baby, children step back from reality. The TinkerToy becomes a means for separating the idea “lollipop” from a real lollipop; the blanket becomes a means for separating the idea “baby” from a real baby. This severing of thought from objects and actions occurs because, in play, children change an object’s usual meaning. In calling the TinkerToy a lollipop, Sophie conjured up the idea of a lollipop and used it to alter the TinkerToy’s identity. As a result, rather than reacting impulsively to the sight of a lollipop, Sophie relied on ideas to regulate the lollipop’s very existence—and the teddy bear’s, the leprechaun’s, and her own actions toward it!
At first, children find it difficult to distinguish words and other mental symbols from the objects and actions to which they refer. Parents seem to realize this when, in the presence of their 1- or 2-year-old, they phrase things this way to an adult companion: “After we finish running errands, let’s stop off for some i-c-e c-r-e-a-m.” Ask parents why they spell rather than say the words, and they remark, “If you say ‘ice cream,’ he’ll want it now. He won’t be able to wait!”
Children’s earliest efforts at make-believe also reveal how challenging they find the task of detaching thought from reality. Initially, object substitutions are closely tied to the real things they represent. Toddlers between ages 1 1/2 and 2 generally use only realistic-looking objects while pretending—a toy telephone to talk into or a cup to drink from.9 Once, I handed a 21-month-old a small wooden block, put another to my ear, and called her on the phone: “Ring! Ring! Hello, Lynnay!” She responded by throwing down the block and turning to another activity. Yet when given a plastic replica of a push-button phone, Lynnay readily put the receiver to her ear and pretended to converse.
Around age 2, children begin to pretend with less realistic toys, such as a block for a telephone. And sometime during the third year, they can imagine objects and events with little or no support from the real world, as when they say to a play partner, “I’m calling Susie on the phone!” while dialing with their hands or without acting out the event at all. Between ages 3 and 4, this detachment of make-believe symbols from the real-life conditions they stand for is well developed. Let’s look in on 4-year-old Alison as she draws her father into a make-believe scenario. Notice how Alison’s imagination ranges far beyond the immediate play props before her—a tea set, a toy truck, and an ambulance. In the span of a few moments, she conjures up a fantastic, multicolored house and room and travels to a distant land where she witnesses a cataclysmic event!
Alison: (while stacking multicolored plastic spoons) I don’t need my house painted. It just got painted today!
Father: Just got painted today?
Alison: Yep.
Father: What color was it painted?
Alison: It’s kind of, it’s got brown and red in it.
Father: Brown and red?
Alison: And a little peach color.
Father: A little peach color? What color is your bedroom?
Alison: Well, it’s yellow and orange and red.
Father: That sounds pretty.
Alison: All mixed together!
Father: Oh, all mixed together.
Alison: Well, I have a dump truck. Or—what else would you like? An ambulance? (Picks up toy ambulance and hands it to her father)
Father: Did someone get in an accident?
Alison: Well, yes. (Then, referring to a newspaper report her father had mentioned earlier in the day) This morning, it said (changes to a low-pitched, somber tone of voice), “Two trains crashing—in India.”
Vygotsky maintained that in detaching symbols from objects and actions, make-believe play helps children use thought to choose deliberately among alternative courses of behavior. In play, Alison thinks about paint colors, which need not be the color of her real room. She learns that you can consider possibilities and choose among them, thereby controlling eventual outcomes.
Imaginative play, Vygotsky noted, also functions as a bridge from the concrete thought of the preschool and early school years to mature “adult thought, which can be totally free of real situations.”10 In helping children disengage thought from reality, pretend play is vital preparation for the much later development of abstract thinking, in which symbols are manipulated and hypothetical ideas are evaluated without referring to currently existing, real world conditions.11
When imagination eventually combines with the logical, abstract reasoning powers of adolescence, the stage is set for creativity. A truly creative work is both original and sensible; its novelty is culturally meaningful and useful. Almost always, creativity demands a high degree of self-regulation—pulling together previously unrelated ideas, critically evaluating those ideas, and persevering in the face of obstacles.12 In make-believe, Alison experimented with the first step of this multistep process when she melded news of the train crash in India with the toy ambulance before her. As we will see shortly, people renowned for their creative accomplishments often report that make-believe play was a frequent, highly influential aspect of their early development.
Acquiring and Enacting the Rules of Social Life
Had Vygotsky lived long enough to become familiar with Erik Erikson’s psychoanalytic theory, he would have agreed that make-believe play teaches children about social roles and provides them with insights into what they can become in their society. But Vygotsky was far more explicit about just how pretending helps children acquire dispositions that foster eager, willing participation in social life.
Children’s imaginative play, Vygotsky pointed out, contains an interesting paradox. In play, preschoolers seem to do what they most feel like doing, and to an outside observer, their play appears free and spontaneous. Nevertheless, pretend play demands that children act against their immediate impulses because they must subject themselves to the rules of the make-believe scene.13 A child pretending to go to sleep follows the rules of bedtime behavior. Another child imagining herself to be a mother and a doll to be a baby conforms to the rules of parental behavior. And a child playing astronaut obeys the rules of shuttle launch and space walk.
In this sense, make-believe is not really “free play,” as we often assume it to be. Instead, its very essence is self-restraint—voluntarily following social rules. While pretending, Vygotsky explained, children repeatedly face conflicts between the rules of the make-believe situation and what they would do if they could act impulsively, and they usually decide in favor of the rules. When tired, Sophie’s teddy bear and leprechaun don’t stay up late doing just as they please. Instead, they obey their caregivers and go to bed. With only one lollipop, or pacifier, to go around, teddy bear and leprechaun share. They don’t quarrel and grab, and if they had done so, Sophie or another make-believe character probably would have intervened and insisted on kind, considerate behavior.
According to Vygotsky, children’s greatest self-control occurs during make-believe play. They achieve their maximum display of willpower when at their own initiative they renounce a momentary attraction in favor of rule-governed behavior.14 The paradox of make-believe is that in everyday life, when children subordinate actions to rules, they usually give up something they want—instead of keeping a treasured toy all to themselves, they share it; instead of continuing to play, they clean up; instead of watching more TV, they go to bed. During fantasy play, however, renouncing impulse and following social rules are central to the fun of playing. Rather than frustrating or disappointing the child, self-restraint is the route to maximum pleasure.
In sum, subordinating immediate desires to the rules of make-believe scenes becomes a new form of desire15—one that responds to the child’s need to become an accepted member of his or her culture. Indeed, if you watch preschoolers at play, you will see that they rarely violate the rules of their social world. And as they jointly create play scripts and follow social rules with peers, they come to appreciate society’s norms and strive to uphold them. A child playing storekeeper experiences firsthand the reasons for having customers line up to pay, for making change accurately, and for being polite. A child playing parent in a household scene becomes aware of parental responsibilities and why it’s important for children to follow their parents’ directives.
In fact, an adult who breaks a rule in make-believe usually brings preschoolers’ profound respect for social order into bold relief! Cara, a demanding but spirited 5-year-old, likes to initiate make-believe with the following transparent role reversal: “Mom, I’ll be the mother, and you be my child 5 years old.” Cara’s mother plays along for a while and then deliberately transgresses, refusing to eat her vegetables or pick up her toys. At the first sign of misbehavior, Cara lectures in a tone of voice well beyond her years: “Children must obey their parents because their parents know things they don’t, so the parents must take care of them.” As Cara’s pronouncement makes clear, play creates a “zone” through which preschoolers internalize a basic sense of social responsibility and morality. At the same time, they acquire a wealth of practical knowledge and skills.
In extreme circumstances, when the organization and predictability of the real world fall apart, young children whose prior lives have been filled with parental warmth and involvement often call on rules and rituals in make-believe to restore their social world. Recently, I came across the recollections of Alice Cahana, an elderly Holocaust survivor, recounting her days as a child in the death camp at Auschwitz. Alice explained that she and her sister Edith managed despite all odds to stay together. Their secret strategy was never to display any emotion that would give away their relationship, since a major objective of the SS was to break up families. Only at night did they dare to hug, whisper, and play together.
On Friday nights, they marked the Sabbath in a special way, by imagining that they were at home. They talked about the evening’s events in minute detail to make the image of family life firm and real. Alice had always had the responsibility of setting the table, and her mother would correct her if she left out even small, nonessential items. In play, Edith would murmur, “Alice, it’s time to set the table. Find the nicest tablecloths, and don’t forget the flowers. Where are the napkins for the guests? You forgot the fork for Father. You really shined the candelabra beautifully this week, better than before.” 16 After their pretend meal, the two sisters would whisper songs.
The rules of make-believe kept alive the integrity of the girls’ lost social world. They kindled hope, or as Alice put it, “an inner light,” fortifying the children with the self-restraint and forbearance they needed to endure the next day.
from make-believe play to organized games
with rules
Vygotsky regarded the sociodramatic play of the preschool years as essential for further development of play—specifically, for movement toward game play in middle childhood. In make-believe, the rules of play are implicit; preschoolers are hardly aware of enacting them. Instead, they are caught up in creating imaginary situations—putting a stuffed animal to bed, driving an ambulance to a train crash, or ringing up a customer’s purchase at the cash register. Winning and losing, team membership and competition, and purposefully laying down rules are not of great interest to preschoolers. Try playing a rule-based game with a 3- or 4-year-old, and you are likely to find that the child is easily sidetracked. If, with your prompting and guidance, the child does finish the game, he or she might say, “I won!” or “Everybody won!” regardless of the outcome.
With age, the imaginativeness of play recedes. In the games that captivate school-age children, rules come to the forefront.17 Six- to 8-year-olds are often preoccupied with working out the rules of a game and making sure all players follow them. They often spend as much or more time on the details of how a game should proceed as they do playing the game itself! Nevertheless, every organized game with rules contains an imaginary situation in veiled form. In Monopoly, children are real estate moguls; in baseball, they emulate Hall-of-Fame idols. Children retain both aspects of play, in changing balances, throughout development.
Increasing emphasis on the rule-oriented side of play extends the “zone” forged by fantasy play during the preschool years. By making children more aware of the goals of their play activities, game play further strengthens children’s capacity to overcome impulse. Consciously striving to reach a goal requires planning—postponing action in favor of thinking out what to do in advance, organizing one’s behavior in accord with the plan, evaluating how well the plan is working along the way, and revising the plan if necessary.
In the simple games of the late preschool and early school years, the play goal is very clear—in hide-and-seek, to keep the person who is “it” from finding you; in Chutes and Ladders, to travel a road with as many shortcuts and as few setbacks as possible, getting to the finish line first. Gradually, the goals of children’s games become more distant and complex. Attaining those goals requires more intermediate steps and greater knowledge, skill, and coordination of play actions with those of others—in T-ball and kickball, scoring more runs than the other team while adhering to fair procedures for batting, pitching, and fielding; in chess, moving each type of piece according to its special rule in an effort to checkmate the opposing king.
Through game play, children receive additional experience in setting goals, in regulating behavior in pursuit of those goals, and in subordinating behavior to rules. And in negotiating rules in peer-organized games, children deepen their understanding of why rules are necessary and which ones work well. In the process, they form more mature concepts of fairness and justice. Indeed, parents and teachers often remark that game play prepares children for the inevitability of real downfalls and teaches perseverance and good sportsmanship.
In sum, the development of play proceeds from make-believe, with an overt imaginary situation and covert rules, to organized games, with overt rules and a covert imaginary situation. The vast yet nearly effortless learning that takes place through pretending makes it, for Vygotsky, “the highest level of preschool development. The child moves forward essentially through play activity.”18 Make-believe play, in Vygotsky’s theory, is the preeminent educational activity of early childhood.
contributions of make-believe play to development
Vygotsky emphasized the development-enhancing, forward-moving consequences of make-believe. Was he correct that pretending in early childhood has a far-reaching impact on development, supporting the emergence and refinement of a wide variety of competencies? Indeed, much evidence fits with Vygotsky’s conclusion.
Sociodramatic play with peers has been studied most thoroughly. Comparisons of preschoolers’ sociodramatic activities with their social nonpretend pursuits, such as drawing pictures or putting puzzles together in the company of agemates, supports Vygotsky’s view of make-believe as a “zone” in which children enhance their own development. In social pretending, preschoolers engage in lengthier interactions, are more involved, draw more children into their activity, and are more cooperative. In view of these findings, it is not surprising that 4- and 5-year-olds who spend more time at sociodramatic play are advanced in intellectual development and are judged more socially competent by their teachers.19 Furthermore, pretend play fosters a diverse array of specific cognitive and social skills, which contribute to these broad-baseed outcomes. Let’s take some examples.
Attention
Attention is fundamental to all human thinking. It determines the information considered in any task and whether the task will be completed. As any parent or teacher knows, young children spend only short times involved in most activities and are easily distracted. Yet attention becomes more sustained over early childhood—a development that equips children for concentrated involvement, which will be essential for success once they enter school.
Under what conditions are preschoolers most likely to display sustained attention? Think back to the examples of Sophie’s and Mattie’s behavior at the beginning of this chapter, and the answer will be clear: during play, especially complex play. In two studies, psychologist Holly Ruff and her collaborators sat toddlers and preschoolers at a table of toys. Children’s patterns of attention changed dramatically with age.20 After playing for a short time with a toy, 1- to 2-year-olds dropped it and turned to another. Their attention was externally controlled by the physical properties of the objects. Hence, they flitted from one toy to another and lost interest as the play session progressed. But once children began to set goals in play, the nature of their attention changed. It became effortful, as indicated by eyes fixed on the toys and a determined facial expression.
For the youngest children, play goals were often as simple as getting a cap off a bottle. With age, the problems and challenges children set for themselves became more elaborate, such as building an intricate structure out of small blocks or acting out a fantasy scenario. The more complex children’s play goals, the more they displayed focused, effortful attention and the more such attention increased over the play session. And in one of the studies, both construction and imaginative play were powerful predictors of sustained attention between ages 2 and 5.21 With respect to make-believe, when preschoolers create very intricate scenarios, either on their own or with play partners, they generally stay absorbed for a very long time.
Recall the anecdote about David, who remained an attentive pupil considerably longer while playing school than he did in other kindergarten activities. Preschoolers’ sustained attention is more advanced in make-believe than in many real-life pursuits. When permitted to select freely among diverse activities at child care or preschool, young children overwhelmingly prefer fantasy play. Observing in a child-care center richly equipped with play materials, Kathleen Kirby, one of my graduate students, found that 2- to 4-year-olds spent 45 to 50 percent of free-choice periods immersed in make-believe—nearly twice as much time as they devoted to any other activity.22 The rapt attention engendered in pretend play may eventually carry over to nonpretend contexts.
Memory
Fantasy play also strengthens young children’s memories. Preschoolers remember information better in a play context than in a context in which information is isolated from its everyday use and they are told to remember deliberately.
Psychologist Lawrence Newman permitted one group of 4- and 5-year-olds to play with a set of toys and told another group simply to remember the toys. Play produced far better recall.23 During the “remember” condition, children repeatedly named and touched the objects—a rehearsal strategy that, much like repeating a phone number, helped them hold on to information, but only briefly. In contrast, the “play” condition led to many spontaneous organizations of the toys that enabled children to recall effortlessly. Often these grew out of make-believe—for example, putting the toy shoes on the doll and pretending to feed her the toy banana. Narrating imaginative activities also yielded excellent recall, as in “I’m squeezing this lemon” or “Fly away in this helicopter, doggie!” When children embedded an object in meaningful make-believe, they increased its memorableness.
Furthermore, children acting out stories during pretend play are assisted in mastering the storytelling script, or basic framework of story organization. Preschoolers’ pretend scenarios are often quite storylike, consisting of characters, settings, and plot sequences that include adventure, suspense, surprise, conflict, and resolution. Witness the following trip to Sea World, during which Emily and her friends save Baby Shamu from danger:
S: (to Emily) Would you come with us? Let’s go to Sea World.
E: Sea World! Let’s watch Shamu! I’m the mom. (All three children run to one end of the room and sit down next to one another. They gaze toward the other end of the room.)
S: Oh! I see Shamu.
E: It’s starting (presumably the show).
A. J.: Yeah!
E: There’s a little fish. There’s a big mom.
S: There’s a daddy.
E: Look! He fell on the ice. Look at ‘em. Mommy and Daddy are fell! Oh-h-h-h!
S: (Patting a pretend Baby Shamu) Oh-h-h-h! I know you’re all right. (All make stroking motions on a pretend Baby Shamu.)
E: Look! All better now. (She pretends to lift Baby Shamu back into the water.) 24
Children like Emily, who have formed a sense of story through make-believe, more readily grasp the organization and meaning of new stories and are therefore more likely to remember them.25 Young pretenders also impose the standards of story organization on the way they recall and explain their experiences to others. Their verbal narratives are more cohesive than those of agemates who prefer other forms of play.26
In helping children grasp the storytelling script (and in other ways we will take up next), make-believe play is wonderful preparation for literacy. Being able to anticipate story organization eases the task of making sense of written prose. It also grants children a firm foundation for authoring their first written narratives.
Language and Literacy
As the findings just mentioned illustrate, make-believe greatly enriches children’s facility with language. During sociodramatic activities, preschoolers hear speech that describes and comments on actions going on at the moment. This helps ensure that language is understandable because it is in tune with ongoing events. Consequently, when new words arise in the course of a fantasy scene, children can determine their meaning easily from cues in the situation. In this way, vocabulary extends during make-believe as children introduce words they have heard during recent experiences. For example, “I’m going out. I need my cloak,” said 5-year-old Lizzy, mimicking an expression she had heard in a TV movie while grabbing a dress-up raincoat from a hook in the housekeeping area at child care.
“You mean your coat?” asked Lizzie’s playmate.
“Right, a cloak is a coat,” Lizzie explained. The amount of time preschoolers spent talking with peers while pretending is positively associated with the size of their vocabularies at age 5.27
As children engage in play talk, they not only build their vocabularies but correct one another’s errors, either directly or by demonstrating the acceptable way to speak. In one instance, a kindergartner enacting a telephone conversation said, “Hello, come to my house, please.” Her play partner quickly countered with appropriate telephone greeting behavior: “No, first you’ve got to say ‘How are you? What are you doing?’”28
Furthermore, the language skills required to express different points of view, resolve disagreements, and persuade peers to collaborate so play can continue are complex and often subtle. Emily’s success in convincing several classmates to join the make-believe trip to Sea World was partly due to the way she approached them—by asking if they’d like to go. By experimenting with language during play, children can see how others react to various styles of communication and use that information to refine their way of speaking. In this way, play is an ideal arena for mastering all aspects of conversational dialogue.
Opportunities to acquire literacy-relevant skills also abound in make-believe play. In one kindergarten, children transformed the block-building area into a make-believe recycling center with the help of their teacher. Signs were prepared that advertised the new center, its hours, and what it would pay for various goods. As in other friendly businesses, attendants wore nametags, such as “Hi, I’m Charles!” When customers arrived with goods, the attendants had to fill out receipts listing each item, its quantity, and its value. Since many children could not yet spell, they used first letters or drew pictures of items. While doing so, they often became curious about how to write the full word and asked the teacher to help them.
What does research say about the role of make-believe in children’s literacy development? The amount of time children devote to pretending at age 4 is positively related to reading and writing skills after entering kindergarten and first grade—specifically, the extent to which children spontaneously read words on game cards and signs, understand print concepts, and write letters and simple words.29 The more children engage in literacy-relevant play (activities like the recycling center), the more advanced their literacy skills are as well.
Preschoolers’ commentary about language while pretending, using such verbs as say, talk, tell, write, and explain, is a particularly good predictor of reading progress at age 5. Using language to talk about language happens often as peers jointly create fantasy scenes. Such talk may help children treat both oral and written narratives as objects of analysis; hence its benefits for early reading.30
With respect to writing, object substitutions and role play seem to have special benefits.31 Frequently using objects to symbolize other objects and transforming oneself into various characters may encourage children to try to make sense of other symbol systems, such as how to express themselves with print. In their first efforts to write, preschoolers commonly assume that letters (just like pictures and first substitute objects) look like their meanings. In one instance, a child stated with certainty that the word deer begins with the letter O because O is shaped like a deer; then he demonstrated by drawing an O and adding antlers to it!32 Flexibly using make-believe symbols seems to assist children in revising early, incorrect ideas about how print is used to communicate.
Hypothetical Reasoning
During the preschool and elementary school years, thought is largely tied to the here-and-now. Children think in an organized fashion about concrete information they can directly perceive but have great difficulty reasoning about hypothetical situations—ones that do not make sense in the real world. For example, try giving a child between 4 and 9 the following problem: Suppose dogs are bigger than elephants and elephants are bigger than mice. Which one is the biggest: dogs, elephants, or mice? Most will insist that dogs couldn’t possibly be bigger than elephants. “That’s never true!” they exclaim.33
Yet with the help of make-believe, even preschoolers can transcend these limits and reason about situations that defy real-world knowledge. Consider the following “impossible” premises and question: All cats bark. Rex is a cat. Does Rex bark? Psychologists Maria Dias and Paul Harris had one group of 4- to 6-year-olds act out problems like this one, using toys that represented the content of the premises. A second group was told that the events were taking place on a pretend planet rather than on Earth. And a third group merely listened and answered the questions. Children in the two “play” conditions gave more hypothetical responses and also justified their answers with hypothetical ideas—for example, by saying “In the story, cats bark, so we can pretend they bark.”34
The capacity to adopt a “theoretical” mode of reasoning in make-believe is highly consistent with Vygotsky’s belief that pretending assists children in separating mental symbols from the objects and actions for which they stand, thereby permitting them to manipulate meanings in innovative ways. Reasoning about the nonreal is essential for abstract thinking and for many creative endeavors—that is, for human cognition to reach its highest potential.
Distinguishing Appearance from Reality
After kissing their preschooler goodnight and turning out the lights, many parents are accustomed to hearing refrains like this: “Mommy, Daddy, monsters are in my room again!” To rid the bedroom of scary creatures, pictures and mobiles may have to be removed and a thorough search conducted to assure the child that no monsters are lurking in the shadows, waiting to reappear as soon as the parent leaves. Uncertainty about the relation between appearance and reality also surfaces in other situations. On Halloween, a 3-year-old who eagerly dons her costume may become frightened at the sight of her animal- or witch-like appearance in the mirror. And a father who shaves off his beard and mustache may find that his young preschooler reacts with puzzlement and distress to his changed appearance.
Consistent with these all-too-familiar experiences, research confirms that preschoolers are easily tricked by the outward appearance of things. They mistakenly conclude that the way things look or sound is the way they really are. In several studies, psychologists John Flavell, Francis Green, and Eleanor Flavell presented children with appearance–reality problems in which objects were disguised in various ways. The children were asked what the objects were, “really and truly.” Before age 6 or 7, most children took things at face value.35 When asked whether a white piece of paper placed behind a blue filter is “really and truly” blue or whether a can that sounds like a baby crying when turned over is “really and truly a baby,” they responded, “Yes!”
Yet in make-believe, children use objects to symbolize things that are very different from the objects themselves—a ball to stand for an apple, a laundry basket for a cradle. They do not judge these imaginary symbols to be real, so clearly they can tell the difference between pretend and real experiences long before they can answer many appearance–reality problems correctly.36 The more 3- to 5-year-olds spontaneously engage in joint make-believe with classmates at preschool, the better they can distinguish the apparent and real identities of disguised objects.37 Pretending with peers may help children master appearance– reality distinctions because it offers repeated practice in transforming a wide variety of objects from their real state to a pretend state and back again.
Understanding the Mind and Its Many Activities
Make-believe play provides a rich foundation for children’s comprehension of the mind’s wide-ranging capabilities. In Chapter 3, I noted that children’s elaborate interactions with imaginary companions foster understanding of false belief and other people’s perspectives. In sociodramatic play as well, opportunities to act out and coordinate various roles probably help children grasp similarities and differences between people in desires, beliefs, and feelings. Recently, a mother recounted to me a make-believe episode initiated by her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Traci, involving extended experimentation with and reversals of roles, which led to abundant dialogue about mental states.
One evening, Traci, her two older sisters, and her parents had gathered in the living room to watch a video of The Sound of Music. Although Traci showed little interest in the movie, her ears perked up at a statement in the sound track reporting the death of the mother of the Trapp-family children. Traci began to ask questions, to talk about how the mother must have gotten sick and gone to the hospital, and to repeat that the mother had died. For the next hour and a half, she assigned her own mother and herself at least fifteen different roles—mother, father, baby, sister, doctor, nurse, and more—as she explored the idea of a mother dying:
Traci: “Here, you’re the baby and I’m the mama. Honey, I’m going to the hospital.”
Mother: “Go to the hospital and have the doctor help you feel better.”
Traci: “No, I’m not going to feel better. I’m going to die!”
Mother: (frantically) “No, no, I don’t want you to die! I’ll be very, very sad.”
Traci: “OK, don’t worry, it’ll be all right.”
Some scenarios (like this one) ended happily; others were filled with depressing events and ended sadly. In acting them out, Traci imagined and simulated diverse wants, hopes, worries, and strivings of people in her life.
As this brief vignette illustrates, sociodramatic play is rich in mental-state language, especially references to emotion. As children learn about mental states from conversing and engaging in make-believe with adults, they transfer this knowledge to sociodramatic play with peers. The more 3- and 4-year-old friends talk about mental states during joint make-believe, the better they perform and the more they improve over the following year on tasks assessing their grasp of mental life.38 These include understanding of false belief, identifying the feelings of a puppet acting out emotionally charged situations (such as seeing a parent off on a trip), and explaining real-life causes of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and mixed emotions (for example, why one might feel both happy and sad about winning a race against a friend).
Talk between siblings that focuses on feelings seems to play a particularly strong role in the diversity of themes that siblings act out in their joint make-believe. Complexity of play with siblings, in turn, is a good indicator of preschoolers’ understanding of other people’s feelings—more so than is their play with mothers.39 Why might conversing and pretending with siblings make a special contribution to children’s capacity to read others’ emotions? In interacting with their child, mothers spend much time acknowledging and clarifying the child’s feelings. Siblings (as well as preschool friends) frequently articulate how they themselves feel. Therefore, siblings more often expose the child to the inner states of someone other than the child himself or herself. The more affectionate and cooperative siblings’ relationships are, the more sophisticated their sociodramatic play.40 Siblings who get along well are probably better at creating and sustaining elaborate make-believe scenarios—play that contributes to their emotional sensitivity.
As children build on each other’s play themes, they often refer to their make-believe with mental terms by making statements like these: “Let’s pretend,” “Let’s imagine,” “You act like a pilot, and I’ll make-believe I’m in the control tower.” Some experts believe that this suspension of play to communicate about it marks a major change in understanding.41 Now children do not just represent experiences in play; they display awareness that make-believe is an activity in which the mind creates events. As a result, children become capable of consciously reflecting on and deliberately manipulating their own and others’ fanciful representations, and their play becomes even more complex and imaginative.
Researchers continue to debate whether preschoolers actually view pretending as a mental state rather than just a series of actions mirroring real life.42 But there is clear evidence that their grasp of make-believe as a mental activity improves steadily between ages 4 and 8. Over time, they can answer more subtle questions about the nature of make-believe. For example, by age 6 most realize that pretending depends on having prior knowledge about a make-believe role. That is, a person hopping can be pretending to be a rabbit only if he or she knows that rabbits hop.43 Children age 6 and older also recognize that make-believe is something you can do just inside your head, without using your body at all.44
Why is this understanding of make-believe as mental representation so important? When children master this and other related ideas—that people are constantly engaged in thought, even when they have nothing to do; that mental inferences, not just direct observations, can lead to new knowledge; and that prior experiences affect people’s interpretations of new experiences45—they show that they have begun to pay more attention to the processes of thought.46 “Thinking about thought” makes possible a major advance in self-regulation. It permits children to call on what they know about mental life to surmount cognitive and social challenges. The child well aware of the mind’s active, transforming capabilities is more likely to attend to relevant information, to plan, to use memory and problem-solving strategies, and to evaluate and revise his or her thinking to make it more effective. In sum, make-believe in early childhood is among those factors that promote reflective thought, which improves throughout the school years.
Self-Regulation
As we have just seen, pretend play, through its impact on children’s awareness of the mind, fosters advanced forms of self-regulation. But what about the self-regulatory capacities that emerge earlier, during the preschool years—self-guiding private speech, willingness to take on chores, and capacity to delay gratification for brief periods? Does make-believe foster these early indicators of a self-regulated child? Findings of several studies I carried out with my graduate students suggest that it does.
private speech. In the first of these studies, we reasoned that if Vygotsky is correct that children learn to overcome impulse and manage their behavior through pretend play, then private speech should be especially frequent within make-believe activities. To find out, graduate student Kerry Krafft and I observed 3- to 5-year-olds during free-choice periods in two contexts differing sharply in encouragement of imaginative play: the Y Preschool (called this because it is sponsored by the YWCA) and the Montessori Preschool.47
In the Y Preschool, play formed the basis of the daily program. Children had easy access to a wide variety of toys, games, and books, and each classroom contained two centers especially conducive to sociodramatic play: a block-building area with hundreds of blocks varying in size and shape and a child-sized playhouse brimming with all manner of housekeeping props. The Montessori Preschool, in contrast, actively discouraged make-believe (although not all Montessori schools do so). Spurred by philosophical principles advocating realistic activities, the Montessori teachers set up “work stations” from which children selected. Typical options were puzzles, picture-matching and picture-sequencing tasks, letter tracing, small construction blocks, containers with water for pouring, books, and crayons and other tools for drawing and writing. When Montessori children strayed into make-believe, teachers often interrupted, drawing them back to work-station pursuits.
Nevertheless, Montessori children did engage in pretending, but it was sharply restricted relative to children in the Y Preschool, who displayed three times as much imaginative play. What happened to private speech? It showed a parallel trend. Children in the Y Preschool engaged in twice as much self-talk as did children in the Montessori preschool. Furthermore, pretend play emerged as the strongest correlate of both fantasy-play private speech and self-guiding private speech. That is, the more children engaged in make-believe, the more they talked to themselves to work out pretend characters’ actions and to guide their thought and behavior during realistic tasks. This latter finding suggests that private speech, so rich in the make-believe context, may carry over to children’s self-talk when they face real-world challenges.
Recall from Chapter 3 that as children master puzzles and other problem-solving tasks, their self-guiding speech declines. Yet when graduate student Tina Gillingham and I observed preschoolers in a laboratory playroom liberally equipped with fantasy-play props, we found that private speech during make-believe remained uniformly high from ages 2 to 4 and actually increased at age 5.48 Our interpretation of the prevalence of private speech during make-believe is that children continually set challenges for themselves in fantasy play. Consistent with Vygotsky’s theory, they create their own “zones,” frequently calling on self-directed language to work out their imaginings and bring behavior under the control of thought.
socially responsible behavior. In yet another study, graduate student Cynthia Elias and I addressed the question of whether complex make-believe— specifically, sociodramatic play involving elaborate communication between agemates—promotes socially responsible behavior.49 During the fall of the school year, we observed 3- and 4-year-olds as they played in the block and housekeeping centers of their preschools and rated the quantity and maturity of their fantasy endeavors. Then we assessed social responsibility by observing the children during clean-up periods, recording the extent to which they willingly picked up and put away toys without prompting and assistance. We made these clean-up observations in the fall and again in the spring so we could measure gain in responsible behavior.
Our findings revealed that preschoolers who more often engaged in complex sociodramatic play showed greater improvement in social responsibility over the next 5 to 6 months. And this relationship was particularly strong for children rated by their parents as highly impulsive—that is, who were poorly self-regulated to begin with! In other words, children most in need of enhancing their self-regulatory abilities appeared especially sensitive to the benefits of sociodramatic play.
Imagination and Creativity
In addition to its contribution to many nonplay skills, make-believe can be examined on its own terms: as an imaginative activity that expresses salient aspects of the child’s inner cognitive and emotional life. In Vygotsky’s theory, the drive to fantasize and engage in role play does not fade away with childhood. Instead, he maintained, the imagination of later years is an internalized, condensed form of early childhood make-believe that can be considered play without action. We typically experience it as an elaborate stream of consciousness made up of mental images and silent self-talk that meanders along, remarking on new experiences, reflecting on the past, and predicting the future.50
By introducing fantasy elements into consciousness, this inventive private commentary probably helps us cope with the mundane, repetitive aspects of our daily lives. We resort to such ruminations while waiting; during long car trips or meetings; and at other monotonous or idle times. In this way, early make-believe fortifies us with a mental tool that is vital for adapting to everyday life! And from time to time, we apply logical, adaptive thinking to this inner playfulness to harness it for culturally worthwhile purposes. The result may be a creative idea or product.
Was Vygotsky correct that the imaginative mental combinations that form the basis for creativity originate in the pretend scenarios of early childhood? Unfortunately, we have no long-term studies that systematically observed children for the imaginativeness of their play and then tracked them to document their creative accomplishments in adulthood. And even if such studies were available, many intervening events could blur the connection between early play and adult creativity. At present, all we have available to explore this relationship are the recollections of highly creative individuals about their childhoods or the reports of their biographers.
On a recent visit to my local library, I browsed the shelves devoted to biography, selecting several dozen life stories of accomplished writers, artists, and scientists. The accounts were remarkably consistent: For most, pretend play was an influential aspect of their early years. Often a significant person—a parent, an older sibling, or a relative—promoted imaginative experimentation and a sense of wonder by telling fantastic stories, initiating joint pretend, or offering gifts (such as books and puppets) that inspired make-believe.51
For example, biographical accounts of physicist Marie Curie, co-discoverer of radium and twice winner of the Nobel Prize, invariably make reference to her father’s untiring efforts to provide his children with ideas and games to fill their spare time.52 A chest of colored blocks had special meaning. Marie and her older siblings used the blocks to represent cities, mountains, rivers, countries, and continents. Their father, a high school science teacher, often joined in, capitalizing on play as a way to teach geography. In the home in which Marie Curie grew up, one biographer summed up, “play was learning and learning was play.”53
In poet Sylvia Plath’s childhood, stories and storytelling were pervasive. As a 2 1/2-year-old, Sylvia was intensely jealous of her sickly younger brother for consuming so much of her mother’s attention. While the baby nursed, Sylvia sat nearby on the floor, impatient and unhappy. Her mother discovered that she could defuse Sylvia’s envy with a game in which Sylvia spread out the newspaper before her, picked out all the capital letters on the page, and pretended, in a very grown-up way, to read—an achievement that attracted much parental admiration. Sylvia’s mother often made up bedtime tales, serialized from one evening to the next. Almost as soon as they could talk, Sylvia and her brother responded in kind with limericks, poems, and fantastic stories of their own. On walks to their grandparents’ house and on long car trips, favorite books invariably came along, offering ready inspiration for the children’s imaginative creations.54
Filmstar Charlie Chaplin’s mother was herself a talented comedy actress and singer. As a young child, Charlie often accompanied her when she went to work at the theater. As a result, playacting and impersonating became an early focus of Charlie’s pretending. One evening during a performance, his mother’s voice failed. In a pinch, the stage manager, who had seen Charlie at play, led the little boy onstage in her place. Charlie continued his playacting unabated, which included songs, dances, and impersonations from his mother’s repertoire. He was demonstrating the wares of his first and best teacher in the art of make-believe, and the performance evoked a roar of appreciation and a shower of coins from the crowd.55
In these and many other similar biographical anecdotes, childhood make-believe engendered imaginativeness that was clearly related to outstanding accomplishment in adulthood. Of course, the scientific and artistic talents of individuals like Curie, Plath, and Chaplin are rare among us. Nevertheless, as play theorists Dorothy and Jerome Singer point out, all children have “that same potential for playfulness, for trying out possible lives, that is the foundation for a humbler but personally meaningful creativity.”56
adult involvement in children’s make-believe
Piaget’s view of make-believe play, dominant until recently, asserts that pretending emerges spontaneously when children become capable of symbolic thought. He assumed that very young children could not share play symbols with others. Yet in instance after instance, we have seen that adults are central in preschoolers’ play lives, often encouraging and elaborating on their imaginative strivings. If adults are prominent in early make-believe, how did researchers manage to adhere to an image of young children as solitary fantasizers for so long? The reason is that until recently, make-believe was largely studied in the laboratory, in sessions in which children arrived one-at-a-time and had no alternative but to play by themselves.
Only during the past 10 years have researchers seriously addressed the social context of make-believe. Their findings confirm that pretending, like other higher forms of thinking, flows from social collaboration. More competent partners scaffold young children’s imaginative play, guiding its emergence and gradual refinement. Once pretend capacities are in place, children forge playful understandings with peers that serve as microcosms of cooperative activity, mirroring social relations and goal-oriented pursuits within the larger society.
Scaffolding Children’s Play
Traci, the 2 -year-old who responded so strongly to the mother’s death in The Sound of Music, often pretends with her own mother, Julie. For some weeks, Traci had been talking about a mysterious creature she called a “maserus.” Traci’s description of the creature convinced Julie that the maserus was an imaginative friendly monster. Congested due to spring allergies, Traci was particularly irritable one morning. Well aware that Traci loves make-believe activities, her mother tried to distract her with a favorite pastime.
As Traci sneezed and whimpered, Julie spied a half-full white garbage bag in a corner, situated in such a way that it looked like an animal with a snout. “I think I see a maserus!” Julie declared, pointing to the garbage bag. Immediately Traci cast off her irritability and jumped into action. Over the next hour, she and her mother fed the maserus more trash, read books and sang songs to it, and laughed at the monster’s antics. “By the end of our delightful session,” Julie remarked, “I almost felt the bag was alive.” When the activity changed to the more practical concerns of the day, Traci’s problematic irritability resumed.
Recent research reveals that make-believe is, from the outset, a social activity.57 In Western societies, it usually first appears between parents and children, although older siblings may participate as well. From these interactions, children derive many play skills that enhance their make-believe in other contexts.
In one of the most extensive studies tracing the development of make-believe play, psychologists Wendy Haight and Peggy Miller followed nine children from 1 to 4 years of age, repeatedly visiting their homes to make intensive observations of their pretending.58 The researchers found that most make-believe—from 68 to 75 percent—was social across the entire age span. Mothers were the children’s principal play partners from ages 1 to 3. Over time, mother–child play declined and child–child play increased. By age 4, children played about equally with their mothers and with other children—both siblings and peers.
The dominance of mother–child pretend at the youngest ages, however, was not due to lack of child playmates. Up to age 3, even if siblings and peers were present, children preferred playing with their mothers. Furthermore, Haight and Miller, as well as other researchers, report clear evidence that mothers teach their toddlers to pretend. At age 1, mothers initiate almost all make-believe episodes. They also demonstrate many pretend actions toward objects, thereby showing children how to use one object to represent another.59 Around age 2, mothers begin to talk about nonexistent fantasy objects. In one instance, a mother suggested that an empty bowl was full of juicy oranges, one for each of her son’s miniature zoo animals. This change may help children increase the range and complexity of their play symbols.60
Social Functions and Consequences of Adult–Child Play
Joint adult–child make-believe serves a wide variety of social purposes. Here is a sampling:
•Teaching. At times, caregivers use pretending as a pleasurable way to teach children real-world skills. For example, Michael’s mother capitalized on make-believe to encourage her 3-year-old to use the toilet. Reluctant at first, Michael became an eager learner after being put in charge of toilet training his teddy bear.61
•Enlivening daily routines. Often children and their caregivers call on pretend play to relieve the monotony of chores and other repetitive tasks. While 2-year-old Molly folded socks with her mother, she put a pair together, held it up, and exclaimed, “Mommy, I made us something to eat!”62
•Defusing conflict. Occasionally, make-believe can defuse persistent caregiver–child conflicts. Concerned about 3-year-old Nancy’s use of a pacifier, her mother had been trying to get her to give it up. Nancy resisted. As they played with puppets, Nancy announced, “I want a pacifier!” Her mother’s puppet responded, “Little girl. You have only a red dot for a mouth. I don’t think you can fit a pacifier in there!”63
•Expressing and regulating emotion. Traci’s exploration, with her mother’s help, of what it might be like to have a mother who got sick and died exemplifies how parents and children use make-believe to express and manage intense feelings. In pretend scenarios, Traci acted out feeling ill, feeling better, sadness, happiness, worry, love, and caring.
•Influencing another’s social behavior. Joint make-believe can be an effective strategy for attaining a social goal. When 2-year-old Molly stood at the top of a slide and asked for help, her mother tried to get her to slide down on her own. Molly refused and stepped into pretend: “A shark . . . There’s a shark in the sand!” Molly’s mother immediately helped her down.64
•Having fun. As illustrations of adult–child make-believe throughout this chapter affirm, most of the time parents and children engage in imaginative play just for fun. In fact, some theorists have argued that the earliest expressions of humor emerge out of fantasy play.65 Consistent with this claim, participating in adult–child make-believe seems to precede children’s first verbal jokes. One toddler named Ari, having become an avid make-believer, soon showed a corresponding rise in joking. At 20 months, he touched a picture of a sheep in a book his mother was reading to him, exclaimed “Neigh!” and laughed hysterically. At 21 months, while watching his mother wash dishes, he remarked, “Nutmeg [the family cat] drinks water with spoon” and then interpreted, “Funny thing! Ari tell Mommy joke.”66 As Ari’s humor makes plain, pretending is not just a pleasurable activity in itself but brings pleasure to life in general.
That joint make-believe with adults is such great fun is undoubtedly a major reason that 1- to 3-year-olds are so attracted to it. But why is play with adults, at least initially, more engaging than play with peers? While children’s play skills are still limited, adult scaffolding makes play more interesting, surprising, and absorbing. In several studies, 1- to 3-year-olds engaged in more than twice as much make-believe when their mothers were involved than when they were not. In addition, caregiver support led early make-believe to move toward a more advanced level.67 For example, when mothers actively took part, children produced more complex pretend sequences��not just putting the doll to sleep but brushing her teeth, tucking her into bed, singing a lullaby, and kissing her good night. Furthermore, during parent–child play, make-believe themes are more varied, and parents’ verbal commentary is especially effective in raising both the duration and the complexity of play.
In line with the “zone,” children for whom make-believe is just emerging act more competently when playing with an adult partner than they otherwise would. In Haight and Miller’s investigation, 1-year-olds whose mothers engaged in a great deal of pretending ranked especially high in peer play at age 4. And children of the most imaginative and enthusiastic parents were among the most highly skilled preschool pretenders.
Vital Features of Adult–Child Play
How should parents, caregivers, and teachers go about engaging young children in make-believe? Effective scaffolding of play is somewhat different from scaffolding of nonplay tasks. In fostering play, adults might have explicit goals, such as teaching culturally valued knowledge and skills and promoting self-regulation and imagination. But directiveness and didactic teaching are seldom, if ever, necessary.
As play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith pointed out more than a quarter-century ago, make-believe enables children who are still acquiring language to represent their everyday lives and inner thoughts and feelings more completely than is possible through any other symbolic means. This confirms Vygotsky’s statement that “in play, the child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior.” Look back at the vignettes described in this chapter—of Sophie giving a sleepy teddy bear a pacifier, of Alison recalling the train crash in India, of Emily traveling to Sea World, and of Traci role-playing a mother getting sick and dying—and note how difficult it would be for 2- to 4-year-olds to construct such well-articulated ideas only in words or in their drawings. Consequently, adults do not need to “tutor” preschoolers in pretending, as they sometimes do when helping them master puzzles or other similar tasks.
Instead, adult participation in make-believe works best when it responds to, guides, and builds on the child’s behaviors with demonstrations and suggestions. In support of this approach, psychologist Barbara Fiese’s observations of mothers playing with their 15- to 24-month-olds revealed that maternal questions, directions, and intrusions (initiating a new activity unrelated to the child’s current play) led to immature behavior in which toddlers merely mouthed, touched, and looked at toys. Relentlessly barraging children with information that communicates “at” rather than “with” them fails to involve them in dialogue and interferes with optimum development of play. In contrast, turn-taking and joint involvement, in which mothers sustained or expanded on their child’s play themes, evoked high levels of pretending.68
Maternal interactions that suggest play options related to 1 1/2-year-olds’ ongoing activity—for example, saying “Oh, is the doll trying to swim?” as the child puts a doll into a toy cup—continue to predict extended make-believe sequences and imaginative object substitutions at age 3. In contrast, toddlers whose mothers negate and correct—“No, dolls don’t go in cups, they go in the doll house”—tend to become 3-year-olds who spend much time in simple, immature manipulation of toys.69
Finally, the shared understanding underlying any type of adult–child communication that creates the “zone” is also essential in make-believe. Sensitive and mutually rewarding interaction between mother and baby in the first year of life predicts complexity of mother–child pretending and children’s use of mental-state words during play at age 2.70 Parental behaviors that assist infants in “connecting” socially and becoming effective conversationalists seem to enhance their play competence and ability to talk about others’ thoughts and feelings later on. In sum, quality of adult–child social engagement, both within and outside of make-believe play, has much to do with the potential of such play to lead children’s development forward.
enhancing sociodramatic play with peers
At child care, 4-year-old Sammy joins a group of children in the block area for a space shuttle launch. “That can be our control tower,” he suggests to Vance, pointing to a corner by a bookshelf.
“Wait, I gotta get it ready,” calls out Lynette, who is still arranging the astronauts (two dolls and a bear) inside a circle of large blocks, which represents the rocket.
“OK, all aboard Discovery!” Sammy broadcasts into a small wooden block, his pretend loudspeaker. After Lynette sets up the astronauts, Sammy announces, “Countdown!”
“Five, six, two, four one, blastoff!” responds Vance, commander of the control tower.
Lynette makes one of the dolls push a pretend button and reports, “Brrrm, brrrm, they’re going up!”
Among children who have regular contact with peers, sociodramatic play with agemates increases greatly between ages 3 and 5.71 As this excerpt reveals, by age 4 children can create and coordinate several characters in an elaborate plot and weave together intricate role relationships and story lines—factors that, as we have seen, contribute greatly to their cognitive and social competence.
Pretending with peers draws on the diverse communication skills children develop with adults. A secure infant–parent attachment bond, which grows out of caregiver warmth, responsiveness, and sensitive communication, predicts socially mature peer play in early childhood, including cooperation, empathy, and popularity.72 And as I indicated in Chapter 2, the blend of warmth and expectations for mature behavior that make up authoritative parenting is linked to skilled peer interaction as well. Social play with agemates must be responsive and harmonious to result in pleasurable, satisfying, long-lasting play.
If sociodramatic play with agemates is to serve as a “zone” for learning, shared understanding, or intersubjectivity, is essential, just as it is in adult– child dialogues. In the shuttle-launch episode, Sammy, Vance, and Lynette reached a high level of intersubjectivity as they worked out a division of labor and responded to one another in a smooth, complementary fashion. Of course, children do argue and disagree. Piaget underscored the role of these conflicts in getting children to give up their egocentrism and notice others’ perspectives.73 Yet conflict is far less effective in promoting sensitivity to others’ beliefs, thoughts, and feelings than is returning to a state of intersubjectivity—by engaging in cooperative dialogues and resolving differences of opinion.74
Intersubjectivity among preschool play partners increases with age. When psychologist Artin Göncü observed 3- and 4-year-olds engaged in sociodramatic pursuits, the 4-year-olds more often considered their partners’ preferences and built on their partners’ play acts—by asking a partner what he or she would like to do, introducing relevant new elements into the play narrative, compromising in instances of conflict, and expressing agreement with the partner’s ideas. 75 These features of play reflect children’s developing sensitivity to diverse points of view and their appreciation of the value of a meeting of minds for pleasurable, rewarding play.
Research indicates that parents and teachers rarely mediate preschoolers’ peer relations unless intense disagreements arise that threaten safety or (in the case of teachers) classroom order.76 And when adults do step in, they seldom use interventions that help children regulate their own interaction. Instead, adults often resort to directive strategies, in which they tell children exactly what to say and do and therefore solve the problem for them, as in, “Don’t grab. Ask for a turn!” or “Wait until Sandra is finished.”77
These techniques are appropriate for children who lack social skills and therefore, at least initially, benefit from clear direction. But adults need to modify these strategies to suit children’s play maturity, providing assistance tailored to the child’s “zone.” Sticking with directive interventions does not prompt children to come up with effective solutions to conflict as it arises—strategies that work because they take into account both the child’s and the playmate’s desires.
At times, the adult might model a social skill or give the child examples of strategies, as in, “You could ask Paul, ‘Would you let me try it for a while?’ or you could say, ‘May we share it?’” At other times, the adult might encourage the child to generate possible strategies: “What could you do to get Mary and Andrea to let you play, too?” In each instance, parents and teachers select the level of support that best matches the child’s current social capacities and then pull back as the child acquires new social problem-solving skills.
Many parents and teachers hesitate to mediate children’s play, perhaps because they believe (incorrectly) that children pick up social skills just by spending time with agemates. Vygotsky’s theory tells us that adults are active agents in children’s social development. If they wait until a child’s negative acts become extreme, then their first impulse is to assert high control, and sometimes force. The following three suggestions can help parents and teachers select strategies that foster more mature social behavior:
•Intervene soon enough to prevent peer difficulties from escalating, thereby avoiding highly intrusive intervention tactics.
•Focus on developing the skills of each child, not just on quelling disturbances. Ask yourself, “What have I seen this child do in situations similar to this one? How can I help the child communicate more effectively?”
•Think in terms of the support that is necessary without taking over social responsibilities that children can assume on their own. Ask yourself, “How much of my help does the child require to meet his or her goals in this situation? A general prompt? Some suggested strategies? Or a specific directive and a demonstration?”78
Compared to sociodramatic play, preschoolers find it harder to establish a cooperative, shared framework when working together on realistic projects, such as construction, puzzle, and art activities.79 To collaborate on these tasks, they need much more adult instruction and monitoring than they do in make-believe activities. Here, again, children’s social competence is more advanced in make-believe play than in other situations. The social skills mastered in sociodramatic activities gradually generalize, helping children work toward shared goals in nonplay pursuits.
physical contexts for make-believe play
Adults promote children’s make-believe not just through scaffolding their pretending and social behavior but also through arranging a stimulating, appropriate play environment. The physical context of children’s play is important because it shapes play themes and opportunities to interact with agemates. Consequently, it can have a profound impact on what children learn.
Play Materials
Toys and other play props should capitalize on children’s current make-believe capacities while gently spurring children forward, toward a wider range of themes, roles, and characters and increasingly intricate story lines. As children become conscious of the goals of play and more concerned with rules and rule-following, adults can provide opportunities for game play. Then they can extend these understandings by gradually introducing more complex games.
Martha Bronson’s The Right Stuff for Children Birth to Age 880 is an excellent resource for selecting play materials that support development in early childhood. Although it is written for teachers, preschool and child-care center directors, and elementary school principals, it can also guide parents. Here is an overview of changing needs for make-believe and game materials from toddlerhood into the primary grades.
beginnings: 15 months to 2 years. Toddlers need a small selection of realistic-looking toys to support their beginning capacity to pretend. These include stuffed animals; soft, cloth-bodied or rubber dolls with simple care accessories; a play telephone and housekeeping items to support role play; large hand puppets for an adult and small hand puppets for the child; and transportation toys, both the large riding type and the smaller, hand-manipulated variety. Already, picture books can inspire make-believe, especially when they depict familiar objects and experiences.
By the end of this period, as toddlers begin to develop the representational capacities and fine motor skills for setting up scenes themselves, they enjoy small peg people that fit in cars, boats, and other vehicles. Soon after, they are ready for more complex scenes—dollhouse, garage, or barn. And some start to dress up, an activity that can be supported by old clothing of family members.
expanding make-believe skills: 2 to 3 years. Between ages 2 and 3, fantasy-theme repertoires expand greatly. Children take increasing responsibility for initiating and elaborating make-believe scenarios, first with adults and older siblings, then with agemates. During this period, they can make use of a wider array of make-believe materials—diverse dolls, from babies to children their own age and with physical and cultural differences they see in their communities; more feeding and care accessories; vehicles of different types and sizes; play scenes with a larger number of peg people, animals, and inanimate props; large and small blocks for putting together pretend structures; and a more varied array of dress-up clothing.
Around this age, placing pretend materials in sand and water-play areas begins to inspire highly imaginative and extended play. Also, books, videos, and TV programs with simple narratives offer models that young preschoolers can act out and embellish in make-believe. With respect to TV’s potential for inspiring play, programs with slow-paced, nonviolent action and easy-to-follow story lines, such as “Barney and Friends” and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” lead to more elaborate make-believe play than do those presenting quick, disconnected bits of information.81
blossoming of sociodramatic play: 3 to 5 years. The mid- to late-preschool years are a time of burgeoning capacity for sociodramatic play, especially group pretend. Children incorporate more detail into their play themes and benefit from increasingly varied and flexible props—hand and finger puppets; dolls with articulated limbs that can be manipulated; doll clothing with buttons, zippers, and other fasteners; more housekeeping accessories, such as high chairs, bassinets, and cooking, serving, and washing equipment; and diverse play animals, including fish, reptiles, dinosaurs, and exotic species.
Older preschoolers can comprehend and recall more complex stories, and they like books and videos about children their own age, animals, and everyday life, such as a visit to a hospital, a fire station, or a factory. They also like ridiculous, funny and dramatic, fantastic tales. Often they memorize those they like best and act them out in make-believe.
The years from 3 to 5 are a time of peak interest in play scenes, such as house, school, airport, farm, and zoo.82 In addition to prepackaged scene sets, children can be provided the raw materials—shoe boxes, pipe cleaners, cardboard cylinders, aluminum foil, and art supplies—to create their own scenes. Whereas realistic toys encourage preschoolers to act out everyday roles, nonspecific materials often encourage fantastic role play, such as pirates or creatures from outer space. Fantastic roles, in turn, prompt more complex peer interaction, especially statements that plan and comment on the make-believe scenario itself, as in “I’ll be the pirate and you be the prisoner.”83 Since fantastic make-believe does not follow highly familiar scripts, children must devote more energy to working out each episode and explaining what they are doing to their companions.
Literacy objects offer another powerful illustration of how play materials mold make-believe content. Early childhood educators Susan Neuman and Kathy Roskos provided 3- to 5-year-olds in a child-care program with literacy-enriched housekeeping, office, and library areas. For example, the housekeeping area included cookbooks, coupons, recipe cards, grocery packages, and pencils and notepads for list-making. Compared to agemates in a control program without extra literacy props, the children engaged in far more complex and extended literacy-related pretending.84 They more often talked about literacy objects, pretended to read and write as part of role play, and transformed literacy props imaginatively, such as calling a cookbook a “magic, genie book” and a piece of paper “directions for ballet lessons.”
Children at the upper end of this age range start to become interested in games. At first, simple games that depend on chance rather than strategy or skill are best—lotto, dominoes, and card games based on matching and visual memory (such as Concentration).
advanced sociodramatic and game play: 6 to 8 years. In the early school grades, children display an even greater capacity to create replicas of the world around them—skills that teachers may build on in extended projects, such as studying a Native American village or the wildlife of a rain forest. Six- to 8-year-olds continue to like role play, and teachers can use it to foster their academic development. One third-grade teacher invented a magic carpet on which her class “traveled” to different countries, integrating all academic areas into the experience—reading, writing, math, science, and social studies.
Around ages 7 and 8, as children become more conscious of the rules of play, they like to act out scripted puppet shows and plays. As informal make-believe declines, game play strengthens. By the end of this period, children formulate and implement strategies and cooperate more effectively in games. They have also become interested in competition. Hence, they are ready for basic strategy games—checkers, chess, fantasy and adventure games, word games, and team sports, such as T-ball and soccer.
Equipping and Arranging the Play Environment
In addition to the appropriateness of play materials, their quantity and arrangement affect the maturity and diversity of themes in children’s make-believe. These features of the environment also influence the congeniality of peer interaction.
With respect to quantity, children’s behavior can tell us whether they have too many or too few toys. An excess of toys overwhelms and overstimulates. The child whose bedroom is piled high with all the latest playthings is likely to cherish and play with few of them. Alternatively, poor-quality child-care centers, widespread in the United States, are often underequipped with play materials. In one such program that I visited, the block-building area had only twenty blocks for sixty 2- to 5-year-olds. Although a stove, table, refrigerator, and crib lined the perimeter of the housekeeping area, there were just three dolls, a handful of dishes, one pan, and six dress-up garments to inspire role play. Without adults and play props to engage them, many younger children wandered aimlessly. And rather than becoming immersed in sociodramatic pursuits, older children quarreled over the few toys available. Research confirms that when playthings are in short supply, preschoolers’ conflicts increase.85
The power of play spaces to affect the variety of make-believe themes is dramatically evident in preschoolers’ gender-stereotyped toy choices and pretend themes. By age 2, gender differences in play are evident, and they strengthen over early childhood.86 Parents vary greatly in their gender-role attitudes; the more traditional their beliefs, the more gender-stereotyped their toy purchases and the more stereotyped their children’s play.87 In many classrooms, the arrangement of play areas reinforces these sharp gender distinctions. Separate housekeeping and block-building areas—hubs of preschool pretending—result in girls gathering in housekeeping, where they enact domestic roles, and boys congregating in blocks, where they build intricate structures, play energetically with vehicles, and create fantastic and adventurous scenarios.
When graduate student Cheryl Kinsman and I collaborated with a kindergarten teacher to rearrange these play spaces, striking changes in children’s play occurred. We removed the wall of shelves dividing housekeeping from blocks, joining the two areas into one.88 While the shelves were in place, play was highly gender stereotyped. Children largely interacted with peers of their own gender, especially when girls were in housekeeping and boys in blocks. Also, when boys did enter housekeeping, their play was generally irrelevant to the goals of the setting. In one instance, several boys scurried on all fours around the kitchen table, each pushing a large wooden truck while a traffic director stood on a chair, shouting, “Green light, go! Red light, stop!”
But once the play areas were joined, boys and girls frequently played together. And girls, especially, engaged in more complex play, integrating materials from both areas into their fantasy themes. Finally, negative interactions between children declined after we removed the divider, perhaps because the more open play space reduced crowding and competition for materials. As these outcomes illustrate, play spaces often promote attitudes and practices of the surrounding culture—in ways not evident to teachers and parents. Our intervention encouraged this teacher to think more carefully about the impact her classroom design had on the quality of children’s play experiences.
the transformation of the child’s play world
The make-believe play and games of early childhood offer an influential route to acquiring cultural values and the self-regulation children need to act in accord with those values. In the heat of the child’s relentless requests for new toys advertised on TV and in the possession of playmates, parents seldom stop to ask the question: What activities will this toy inspire? What values will the activities teach? What social rules will my child learn to follow? A comparison of the fantasy activities of American children with those of children in other cultures spotlights potent lessons of the play world not given sufficient conscious consideration.
Children’s make-believe places greater emphasis on imaginativeness and autonomy in Western individualistic nations than in collectivist societies. While American preschoolers often conjure up fantastic roles and vie with peers for the most stimulating and influential of them, children in Asian cultures devote more hours to play in which they perform actions in unison. For example, in a game called Bhatto Bhatto, East Indian children act out a trip to market requiring intricate touching of one another’s elbows and hands as they pretend to cut and share a tasty vegetable.89 On Children’s Day in the Peoples Republic of China, preschoolers gather on lawns outside their classrooms to perform large-group, highly scripted activities for their families. They sing stories conveying social and moral lessons while dramatizing them with complex hand motions and body postures, in which each child acts identically.
The personal expressiveness and role negotiation in Western children’s play are well suited for developing innovativeness, self-reliance, and social problem-solving skills—traits important for success in Western school and work worlds. Nevertheless, Western children’s play has been transformed into an ever-enlarging culture of conspicuous consumption encompassing a seemingly endless array of costly, fancy amusements. Parents are quick to feel guilty about depriving children of the latest “educational” playthings or jeopardizing their integration into a peer network in which toys and other possessions are a salient basis for belonging. Yet parents’ gatekeeper role with respect to play is as crucial as it is in the realm of TV.
An important point to note is that many contemporary toys undermine imagination and self-regulation. Aggressive toys are the most worrisome. Preschoolers who transform a stick or block into a weapon are doing little more than exploring a pervasive aspect of their culture. But equipping children with realistic-looking guns, swords, shields, and other tools of warfare is tantamount to setting up a training ground in aggression. Such toys foster both pretend and real hostility among peers.90 Boys’ penchant for high activity, excitement, and risk taking and their view of weaponry as the ultimate in masculinity attract them to war toys. Furthermore, when boys play with action figures modeled on violent TV and movie characters, such as Power Rangers, Transformers, and X-Men, their play narrows to mimicking the characters’ televised behavior and is generally aggressive and stereotyped. Video games with violent plots in which children advance by shooting and evading the enemy are yet another fantasy pursuit that largely appeals to boys. A growing number of studies confirm that heavy playing of such games duplicates the effects of violent TV by promoting aggression and desensitizing children to violence.91 Furthermore, video games, even more than TV, are riddled with ethnic and gender stereotypes.92
In watching what happens once fast-action video games have entered their households, many parents express another concern—that their children will become addicted to these violent amusements. About 5 percent, usually boys, develop into “passionate,” or excessive, players during the elementary school years and desperately need parental intervention.93 Compared to infrequent users, children highly involved in video games spend less time productively, more often watching cartoons and less often reading.94 One parent whose son, Joey, spent his early childhood focused on play with Transformers and his school years immersed in video games complained about the boy’s mediocre grades and lamented, “Nothing seems to interest him.” Joey spent so much time with highly stimulating video games that he came to regard slower-paced pursuits that require greater initiative to reach a goal as dull.
Of course, preschoolers—even those as young as age 3—benefit from experience with computers as long as activities are constructive, adults are available to support them, and children are not diverted from other worthwhile activities. But in homes in which family members are preoccupied with the computer, especially the Internet, time spent communicating and enjoying joint leisure activities declines.95 Therefore, the computer’s value for acquiring new skills and information must be weighed against its potential for detracting from adult–child dialogues and other family activities.
Children’s opportunities to engage in development-enhancing make-believe and game play are at risk in yet another way. Their lives are often heavily organized and scheduled. Many leave preschool, child-care, and primary-school settings, which may not recognize the value of play, for late-afternoon lessons and adult-organized sports leagues. Contributing to the rise in these adult-directed activities is a decline in neighborhood safety, making parents unwilling to allow their children to gather outside without supervision. In many American communities, child-organized games, handed down from one generation to the next—for example, red rover, statues, blind man’s buff, leapfrog, and endless variants on popular sports—are a thing of the past.
Some experts worry that adult-structured athletics are robbing children of crucial learning experiences that accrue from spontaneous game play. When adults control children’s games, place heavy pressure on them to win, and assign them to specific roles so they lose the opportunity to experiment with rules and strategies, then the arguments of critics are valid. Furthermore, children who join teams so early—by ages 4 or 5—that the physical, cognitive, and social skills demanded are well beyond their current capabilities usually lose interest and want to drop out.96 And parents and coaches who criticize rather than encourage and do not let players forget about defeat prompt intense anxiety in some youngsters. Eventually, those children may avoid athletics entirely.97
To safeguard children’s learning and enthusiasm, make-believe play rather than organized sports is best for preschoolers. When children are ready for game play, permitting them to select sports they enjoy, to progress at their own pace, and to participate in decisions about team rules preserves the positive lessons discussed in this chapter—in cooperation, fair play, and willingly following social rules. Finally, practice times must be adjusted to children’s attention spans and need for unstructured time with family and peers. Two practices a week, each no longer than thirty minutes, is sufficient for 6- to 8-year-olds.98
By observing children’s play themes, we can discover much about the values and identities that our culture—by way of homes, child-care centers, schools, and community youth activities—transmits to the next generation. As leaders in children’s development, parents and teachers are in a prime position to design and influence children’s play worlds in ways that shield them from acquiring materialistic and violent attitudes and behaviors and that accentuate play’s cognitive, emotional, and social benefits. Vygotsky’s theory reminds us that as long as we think carefully about the play materials we offer, the style and content of adult–child play, and the social skills we encourage in children’s peer relations, make-believe play can nurture a wide range of capacities essential for academic, social, and later-life success.
