Why playing is so serious

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By: Annette Karmiloff-Smith

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Article Summary

Many parents consider play merely as a means for their children to amuse themselves and pass the time away. How often do we hear ourselves say: "Oh, he's just playing". But there's nothing "just" about it. I'd even go as far as saying that play is as vital, if not more vital, to your child's development than learning to read, to write or to do arithmetic!

Role of play

When does play begin?

Pretend play

 Play in emotional development
 

Role of play

In fact, play has a fundamental role in the growth of social, emotional, linguistic and intellectual capacities, enhancing your child's expanding knowledge of the world about such complex things as size, shape, gravity, weight, rigidity, and flexibility. And we shall see that such learning already starts in the early months after birth. Play also involves the development of fine motor skills as well as gross motor skills, strengthening your child's muscles for climbing, running and handling heavy objects. Beyond the exploration of the properties of objects, play encourages inventiveness, imagination, creativity and all kinds of problem solving. Indeed, observing the complexities of a young child's play can often be quite breathtaking. So play is crucial to healthy mental and physical development and helps young children progressively make sense of their world. But you might well ask: How could simply pushing two blocks along the floor, pretending they are cars and shouting "vroum, vroum, vroum" possibly contribute to the wiring of important long-term connections in your child's brain? You've probably never thought that play might have such an important function. So let's dissect play and see what really underlies these seemingly idle activities that children immerse themselves in during their first years of life.

When does play begin?

Sometimes it is hard to draw a clear-cut distinction between play and exploration such as when a baby repeatedly throws toys to the ground from her highchair! Is she playing, trying to annoy Mummy or experimenting with gravity? It is probably a mixture of all three, but play has such a vital role in development that the playful aspects of any activity should not be underplayed. In fact, depending on how one defines play, it starts in my view around the third month of life when the baby spends hours trying to swipe at the objects hanging from a mobile above her cot or attempting to grab hold of her own toes. These seemingly idle activities lead progressively to hand/eye coordination and cause new connections to be made in your baby's brain between what are called "visual cortex" and "motor cortex". Connections both within and across brain regions are crucial for development. Babies also become little physicists through play, discovering how objects differ in weight, size and shape, and how they make sounds when banged on a hard surface. Take time to watch how hard your baby concentrates and endlessly tries to adapt her grasp to each new object, and note the pleasure on her face when she finally manages to grasp something even momentarily. Her pleasure in such success releases chemicals, called endorphins, into her brain that bring a sense of calm and achievement.

Pretend play

Psychologists often differentiate two kinds of play: functional play and pretend play. Functional play involves using objects for the purpose for which they were invented in the first place, such as grasping objects on mobiles, rolling balls, building towers and bridges. Pretend play, however, is far more interesting. Here, not only does your child create a story around her bridge or tower, but from about 18 months onwards she starts to use objects for purposes for which they are not normally employed. For instance, she might pick up a banana, pretend that it is a telephone, and go on to have an elaborate pretend conversation through the banana! Or she might use one of her fingers to be the dog and have that finger talk to another finger that is the cat! What enables a child to have one object substitute for another or even play pretend conversations with completely empty hands? Psychologists believe that this represents a huge advancement in children's cognitive capacities, the possibility for symbolic thought. Take the example of the banana and the telephone. First, after noting the similarity in shape, the child then has to suspend or cordon off in her brain everything else she knows about true-life bananas (they come in bunches, they can be eaten, they don't make a noise) and temporarily attribute to the banana in her hand what she knows about telephones (they ring, they can be used to speak with others who are not present), so that the pretence can proceed. Vital to this is the child's capacity to set up a new but temporary pretend representation in her brain that she must cordon off from her existing mental representations of the real world. From that moment, she can live in her internally created "as if" world: the banana is a telephone. During the play episode, you do not see a child trying to eat the banana while it is in the role of a telephone! Yet, all the while she is pretending, the child doesn't delete from memory the real properties of objects (what she knows to be true of real bananas) because, once the game is over, she can readily peal it for consumption! Some psychologists argue that the "as if" world of pretend play is an important precursor for older children's understanding of the "as if" meanings of hypothetical statements like "if dogs had wings, they could fly". Complex, dynamic mental activities are required of your child's brain to sustain a seemingly simple game of pretend play.

Although pretend play starts during the second year of life, it can continue well into the 5th year and even beyond. Its importance lies in the mental activities of the brain required to set up the play: the child has to represent mentally the different protagonists and objects in her game and remember what the roles she has attributed to them. It is an important exercise for working memory. She may, for instance, take two identical dolls and decide that one is to play the mummy and the other the new baby, or that a bead is a piece of chocolate, whereas a block of wood is to be a bus. Once established, the child needs to sustain those roles throughout an entire play episode. This is no mean task for a toddler because objectively the pretend objects often look nothing like the objects they have been made to represent symbolically.

From about 2 to 2 and half years of age onwards, children will often accompany their play with an on-going verbal narrative, either invented from imagination or by replaying an event that they found either difficult to understand or emotionally charged. In order to do this, they have to keep track of the order of events in the narrative. So, while observing these seemingly idle play sessions, listen carefully to the magical narrative your child is mumbling under her breadth and remember that this is placing enormous demands on her memory, on her capacity to invent, and on her language.

Did you know that children often use two different forms of language in their play? One interesting study carried out in the USA discreetly observed groups of children in pretend play situations and recorded the language they used. The research showed that children used two different ways of conveying exactly the same meaning, depending on whether they were playing a role in the play situation or commenting on the play situation. So, for example, one form of the future tense was used when speaking through the voice of one of the characters in the play: "I'm going to go to the park now", but when they momentarily stepped out of pretend play to comment on some event, they used another form of the future tense to convey a similar meaning ("I'm gonna get the other doll now, so the Daddy can come home"). Noting how persistent this was, the researchers concluded that children use different forms of language to mark explicitly when they are in the pretend play and when they step out of the play to set up various characters or events, despite expressing the same meaning. These are vital clues as to how children mark linguistically that pretend play is underway, during which the restrictions of normal reality can be violated to enter the internally created world of play. So, during pretence, people can fly, birds can talk, a pencil can be cooked and eaten, and non-existent water can be poured from a jug and slowly drunk through a ruler playing the temporary role of a straw. Imagine how your child's brain needs to juggle all these new, temporary mental representations without destroying the stable ones which concern the real world.

Pretend play possibilities are almost limitless. Never judge your child's play to be silly. She is actually like a creative playwright, plotting and structuring the story line, taking on different roles, thereby stretching her imagination and intelligence in multiple ways.

Play in emotional development

The role of play in emotional development cannot be overestimated. Children will often confront a difficult problem, such as the birth of a sibling, by working it through in the safe privacy of the play situation in their own little world. Actually, child therapists frequently make use of play to help children who have undergone trauma. As a parent you can often find out more about your child's fears and anxieties by discreetly observing her play than by asking direct questions. So, rather than saying "are you upset?" which requires her to express in words how she is feeling ? something well beyond her capacity at this stage of development - you can discover her deeper feelings by carefully observing the details of her play. Anger and jealousy can often be reduced if played out with dolls. That's why it is a good idea to buy a doll-baby for your toddler if you are expecting a second child. Don't scold your toddler if you see her shouting at the doll or hitting it. This is actually a healthy sign that she is trying to understand and gain control over her new feelings, channelling her anxieties into her pretend world and away from the real baby in the real world. Children also use play to work out social conventions. They act out with their dolls socio-dramatic roles such as teacher, train driver, mummy, daddy, baby, and policeman, for instance, in a variety of complex ways to explore how such roles differ and to gradually understand their place in their ever-expanding social world.

So, next time you see your child engaged in what you used to consider "mere idle play", try to observe her with a different mind set, and think of all the intelligent connections forming in her rapidly developing brain!

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