Play is timeless and universal—apparent in every part of the world for thousands of years. Many developmentalists believe that play is the most productive as well as the most enjoyable activity that children undertake (Elkind, 2007; Bateson & Martin, 2013; P. K. Smith, 2010). Whether play is essential for normal growth or is merely fun is “a controversial topic of study” (Pellegrini, 2011, p. 3).

This controversy underlies many of the disputes regarding preschool education, which increasingly stresses academic skills. One consequence is that “play in school has become an endangered species” (Trawick-Smith, 2012, p. 259). Among the leading theorists of human development, Vygotsky is well known for his respect for child’s play, which makes a playing child “a head taller” than their actual height (Vygotsky, 1980).

Some educators want children to play less in order to focus on reading and math; others predict emotional and academic problems for children who rarely play. It does seem that children who are deprived of activity for a long period tend to play more vigorously when they finally have the chance (Pellegrini et al., 2013), and that for children of all ages, taking a break from concentrated intellectual work enhances learning.

There are two general kinds of play, pretend play that often occurs by a child alone, and social play, that occurs when children are together. The idea that “pretend play is a crucial engine of child development” has been explored in hundreds of studies, carefully reviewed (Lillard et al., 2013, p. 24).

The reviewers do not confuse correlation with causation. They report that evidence is weak regarding pretend play, but they suggest that preventing social play will not only make children less happy, it may impair learning (Lillard et al., 2013). They conclude that play—especially social play—is one way that children develop their minds and social skills, although not the only way.

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How, then, should children play? Young children play best with peers, that is, people of about the same age and social status. Although even infants are intrigued by other small children, most infant play is either solitary or with a parent. Some maturation is required for social play, which may advance brain development and creativity (Bateson & Martin, 2013).

Such an advance can be seen over the years of early childhood. Toddlers are too self-absorbed to be good playmates, but they learn quickly. By age 6, most children are quite skilled: Some know how to join a peer group, manage conflict, take turns, find friends, and keep playmates (Şendil & Erden, 2014; Göncü & Gaskins, 2011). As they become better playmates, they learn emotional regulation, empathy, and cultural understanding.

Parents have an obvious task: Find peers and arrange play dates. Of course, some parents play with their children, which benefits both of them. But even the most playful parent is outmatched by another child at negotiating the rules of tag, at play-fighting, at pretending to be sick, at killing dragons. Specifics vary, but “play with peers is one of the most important areas in which children develop positive social skills” (Xu, 2010, p. 496).

All young children play; “everywhere, a child playing is a sign of healthy development” (Gosso, 2010, p. 95). Play is the favorite activity of young children, as illustrated in Visualizing Development, page 318. Basic play is similar in every culture: throwing and catching; chasing and exploring; pretending to be adults; drawing with chalk, felt pens, sticks, or anything that can make a mark. Accordingly, developmentalists think play is experience-expectant.

Some specifics are experience-dependent, however, reflecting culture and SES. (Developmental Link: Experience-expectant and experience-dependent brain development are explained in Chapter 5.) Chinese children fly kites, Alaskan Natives tell dreams and stories, Sami children of Scandinavia pretend to be reindeer, Cameroonian children hunt mice, and so on. Parents in some cultures consider play important and willingly engage in games and dramas. In other places, sheer survival takes time and energy, and children must help by doing chores. In those places, if children have any time for play, it is with each other, not with adults who spend all their energy on basic tasks (Kalliala, 2006; Roopnarine, 2011).

As children grow older, play becomes more social, influenced by brain maturation, playmate availability, and the physical setting. One developmentalist bemoans the twenty-first century’s “swift and pervasive rise of electronic media” and adults who lean “more toward control than freedom” (Chudacoff, 2011, p. 108). He praises children who find places to play independently and “conspire ways to elude adult management.”

This opinion may be extreme, but it is echoed in more common concerns. As you remember, one dispute in preschool education is the proper balance between unstructured, creative play and teacher-directed learning. Before the electronic age, and in places where technology was rare, most families had several children and few mothers worked outside the home. Then all children played outside with others, and groups often included children of several ages.

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That was true in the United States a century ago. In 1932, the American sociologist Mildred Parten described the development of five kinds of social play, each more advanced than the previous one:

Parten thought that progress in social play was age-related, with 1-year-olds usually playing alone and 6-year-olds usually cooperatively.

Research on contemporary children finds much more age variation, perhaps because family size is smaller and parents invest heavily in each child. Many Asian parents teach 3-year-olds to take turns, share, and otherwise cooperate (stage 5). Many North American children, encouraged to be individuals, still engage in parallel play at age 6 (stage 3). Given all the social, political, and economic changes over the past century, many forms of social play (not necessarily in Parten’s five-step sequence) are normal (Xu, 2010).

Children need physical activity to develop muscle strength and control. Peers provide an audience, role models, and sometimes competition. For instance, running skills develop best when children chase or race each other, not when a child runs alone. Gross motor play is favored among young children, who enjoy climbing, kicking, and tumbling (Case-Smith & Kuhaneck, 2008).

Active social play—not solitary play—correlates with peer acceptance and a healthy self-concept and may help regulate emotions (Becker et al., 2014; Sutton-Smith, 2011). Adults need to remember this when they want children to sit still and be quiet. Among nonhuman primates, deprivation of social play warps later life, rendering some monkeys unable to mate, to make friends, or even to survive alongside other monkeys (Herman et al., 2011; Palagi, 2011). Is the same true for human primates?

Active play advances planning and self-control. Two-year-olds merely chase and catch each other, but older children keep the interaction fair, long lasting, and fun. In the game of tag, for instance, children set rules (adjusted to local terrains and dangers), and each child decides how far to venture from base. If one child is “it” for too long, another child (often a friend) makes it easy to be caught. In that way, all the children can enjoy the game.

The most common form of active play is called rough-and-tumble play because it looks quite rough and because the children seem to tumble over one another. The term was coined by British scientists who studied primates in East Africa (Blurton-Jones, 1976). They noticed that monkeys often chased, attacked, rolled over in the dirt, and wrestled quite roughly, but without injuring one another.

If a young male monkey wanted to play, he would simply catch the eye of a peer and then run a few feet away. This invitation to rough-and-tumble play was almost always accepted with a play face (smiling, not angry). Puppies, kittens, and young baboons behave similarly.

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When these scientists returned to London, they saw that their own children, like baby monkeys, engage in rough-and-tumble play, signified by the play face. Children chase, wrestle, and grab each other, developing games like tag and cops-and-robbers, with various conventions, expressions, and gestures that children use to signify “just pretend.”

Rough-and-tumble play happens everywhere (although cops-and-robbers can be “robots-and-humans” or many other iterations) and has probably been common among children for thousands of years (Fry, 2014). It is much more common among boys than girls and flourishes best in ample space with minimal supervision (Pellegrini, 2013).

Many scientists think that rough-and-tumble play helps the prefrontal cortex develop, as children learn to regulate emotions, practice social skills, and strengthen their bodies (Pellis & Pellis, 2011). Indeed, some believe that play in childhood, especially rough-and-tumble play between father and son, may prevent antisocial behavior (even murder) later on (Fry, 2014; Wenner, 2009).

Another major type of active play is sociodramatic play, in which children act out various roles and plots. Through such acting, children:

Sociodramatic play builds on pretending, which emerges in toddlerhood. But preschoolers do more than pretend; they combine their imagination with that of their friends, advancing in theory of mind (Kavanaugh, 2011). The beginnings of sociodramatic play are illustrated by the following pair, a 3-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy. The girl wanted to act out the role of a baby, and she persuaded a boy in her nursery school to be the parent.

Boy: Not good. You bad.
Girl: Why?
Boy: ‘Cause you spill your milk
Girl: No. ‘Cause I bit somebody.
Boy: Yes, you did.
Girl: Say, “Go to sleep. Put your head down.”
Boy: Put your head down.
Girl: No.
Boy: Yes.
Girl: No.
Boy: Yes. Okay, I will spank you. Bad boy. [Spanks her, not hard]
Girl: No. My head is up. [Giggles] I want my teddy bear.
Boy: No. Your teddy bear go away.
[At this point she asked if he was really going to take the teddy bear away.]
[from Garvey, reported in Cohen, 2006, p. 72]

Note the social interaction in this form of play, with the 3-year-old clearly more mature than the 2-year-old. She created, directed, and played her part, sometimes accepting what the boy said and sometimes not. The boy took direction, yet also made up his own dialogue and actions (“Bad boy”). It is noteworthy that the 2-year-old boy was willing to cooperate. When children are a few years older than these two, play is almost exclusively with peers of the same sex, if they are available (Leaper, 2013).

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A slightly older girl might want to play with the boys, but the older boys usually do not allow her (Pellegrini, 2013). Boy-versus-girl play emerges later, at puberty, but toward the end of early childhood both sexes usually stick to their own unless a particular neighborhood group is quite small, and then the girls and boys play with each other.

Older preschoolers are not only more gender-conscious, their sociodramatic play is much more elaborate. This was evident in four boys, about age 5, in a day-care center in Finland. Joni plays the role of the evil one who menaces the other boys; Tuomas directs the drama and acts in it as well.

Tuomas: And now he [Joni] would take me and would hang me…. This would be the end of all of me.
Joni: Hands behind.
Tuomas: I can’t help it. I have to. [The two other boys follow his example.]
Joni: I would put fire all around them.
[All three brave boys lie on the floor with hands tied behind their backs. Joni piles mattresses on them, and pretends to light a fire, which crackles closer and closer.]
Tuomas: Everything is lost.
[One boy starts to laugh.]
Petterl: Better not to laugh, soon we will all be dead…. I am saying my last words.
Tuomas: Now you can say your last wish…. And now I say I wish we can be terribly strong.
[At that point, the three boys suddenly gain extraordinary strength, pushing off the mattresses and extinguishing the fire. Good triumphs over evil, but not until the last moment, because, as one boy explains, “Otherwise this playing is not exciting at all.”]

[adapted from Kalliala, 2006, p. 83]

Good versus evil is a favorite theme of boys’ sociodramatic play, with danger part of the plot but victory in the end. By contrast, girls often act out domestic scenes, with themselves as the adults. In the same day-care center where Joni piled mattresses on his playmates, the girls say their play is “more beautiful and peaceful … [but] boys play all kinds of violent games” (Kalliala, 2006, p. 110).

The prevalence of sociodramatic play varies by culture, with parents often following cultural norms. Some cultures find make-believe frivolous and discourage it; In other cultures, parents teach toddlers to be lions, or robots, or ladies drinking tea. Then children elaborate on those themes (Kavanaugh, 2011). Many children are avid television watchers, and they act out superhero themes. Some parents never let their children watch videos of any kind, especially ones with violent themes.

That children act out superheroes and villains from video screens is troubling to many developmentalists. They prefer prefer that children’s dramas come from their own imagination, not from the media. Of course, some children learn from videos, especially if adults watch with them and reinforce the lessons. However, children on their own rarely select educational programs over fast-paced cartoons, in which characters hit, shoot, and kick. And then they act out what they have seen.

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Canadian as well as U.S. organizations of professionals in child welfare (e.g., pediatricians) suggest children under age 2 have no screen time, and those over age 2 have less than an hour a day. However about half of all North American children exceed those limits, with screen time increasing as income falls (Carson et al., 2013; Fletcher et al., 2014). Professionals are concerned for many reasons: (1) violent media teaches aggression; (2) gender and ethnic stereotypes are pervasive; and (3) passive watching reduces time for family interaction and active play (see Figure 10.1).

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