PL3234: Developmental Psychology - Term Paper

Review the kinds of play and their likely functions? To what extent is there evidence to support a claim that any of these forms of play actually benefit development?

The significance of play in development did not emerge until the late 20th century, largely due to the earlier collective view that play is “an activity peripheral to the mainstream of development” (Athey, 1984). Nevertheless, increased literature and research dedicated to play have suggested that this activity, in fact, serves important functions in aspects of cognition, language and social interaction, rendering it central to development from infancy onwards.

The purpose of this paper is to firstly, introduce the different types of play that developmental psychologists have classified and researched on, as well as examine their likely functions in developing cognitive, social and language skills. Following which, the extent to which these forms of play actually contribute to such development will be discussed. In this regard, a major point of contention would be that while play as a conceptual framework seem to suggest benefits to development, it does not adequately predict the outcome of development in general. Also, benefits to development can be observed in a particular context but not in another.

With the recognition of play having functional importance, developmental psychologists have classified the myriad of play activities in a cumulative order of play types. The first of which is functional play, where infants engage in “simple, repetitive motor movements with or without objects” (Rubin, Fein & Vandenberg, 1983; cited in Berk, 2006). Movements as such include running around a room, lifting a toy plane and moving it about in the air or tearing up of paper into pieces, to name a few. These repetition and sequence of movements allows for development and coordination of gross and fine muscles which aids in physical growth of the child. In addition, they learn about the spatial relations and properties of the objects which they are handling and acquire suitable physical responses to change and control these properties. Consequently, the child’s self-concept also begins to surface “as a physical object in space and time” (Athey, 1984).

Functional play is not isolated to infancy and early childhood period. In fact, it is associated with middle childhood and adolescence as well, when they begin to engage in more complex physical demands such as learning an instrument or playing sports where specialised physical coordination and skills have to be trained (Athey, 1984).

As motor coordination and skills are developed, children are then equipped with the ability to tackle constructive play, where they begin to construct things out of toys, paint or puzzles. In his paper, Singer (1994) discussed the special properties and functions of toys in providing various constructive plays which can expand children’s imagination and creativity to different degrees. He quoted a study by Pulaski, which revealed that minimally structured toys, such as drawing paper, paints and Play Doh, brought about richer fantasy and ideas than highly structured toys such as Barbie dolls or a dollhouse (Pulaski, 1973; cited in Singer, 1994). Such a finding implies that constructive play can actually cultivate and encourage imagination and creativity which are part of the cognitive development of individuals.

It seems that constructive play also contributes to the development language abilities in children. In a preschool setting where children play with toys together, the toys will elicit the use of language to communicate and maintain play with each other (Pellegrini & Jones, 1994). Even in the absence of playmates, children playing with toys under the guidance of a parent or caretaker will need to appeal to language in order to communicate any difficulties they have with the toys. Language is also used and hence developed to “serve an imaginative function” (Halliday, 1969; cited in Pellegrini & Jones, 1994) as children attempt to express and vocalize their ideas.

Along with the period where constructive play among children is possible, make-believe play is also prominent and important to development. In this activity, children engage in a kind of cooperative play with each other where they construct their own social world by acting out everyday and imaginary roles (Rubin, Fein & Vandenberg, 1983; cited in Berk, 2006), experiment with possible interactions and relationships among people and develop and learn various ways of dealing with social situations. In a sense, this is considered a form of social learning where children actively “develop concepts of different social roles and associate relevant behaviours with these roles” (Athey, 1984), allowing them to respond appropriately in the possible social interactions they may be faced with in real life. These behaviours include socially desirable ones such as cooperation and sharing.

Not only does make-believe play teach and enhance social development, once again, it promotes language use and hence development. Clearly, make-believe play requires communication among the characters that are being acted out and as such, it provides a good avenue for the children to enlarge their vocabulary, learn “a varied repertoire of linguistic strategies” (Halliday, 1969; cited in Pellegrini & Jones, 1994) as well as practice them. With improved language skills, children are also better able to express their own thoughts and emotions.

The last type of play is games with rules which involve the children’s understanding and adherence to the rules set in the games (Rubin, Fein & Vandenberg, 1983; cited in Berk, 2006). Instances of such games are board games, card games and hopscotch.

Given the nature of games with rules, understanding the game naturally becomes a function of language and comprehension skills while adherence to the rules of the game depends largely on the cooperativeness of the child, which is a social dimension which has to be developed beforehand. As Garvey (1977) pointed out, these emerging skills “rest on the reciprocal interaction of the child’s experiences with his physical, cognitive and emotional growth.” Therefore, it appears logical for games with rules to be undertaken only after the three plays that have been discussed so far because the skills involved in games stems from them. It would also follow that this type of play serves the function of applying and developing further the cognitive, language and social skills acquired earlier on by the child.

On the whole, discussion of the various kinds of play so far is largely supportive of the claim that these forms of play actually benefit development, since they appear to improve cognitive, language and social skills. However, while it works and fits well as a conceptual framework in enhancing development, its effectiveness may fail to be illustrated when it is extracted and placed in a different context.

Firstly, on the assumption of play being beneficial to development, there had been an increase in what Sutton-Smith referred to as the “domestication of childhood”. It refers to the “increasing control and supervision of play to get rid of its physical dangers and its emotional licenses” (Sutton-Smith, 1994). As play is being regulated and controlled by having schools’ playground being supervised or the abolition of playtime in the case of the United States, the range of play activities that children can participate in is reduced. This seem to suggest that only limited play activities are ultimately beneficial to development, rendering the general framework of play inadequate in predicting the final outcome of development.

In today’s society, there has been an increase in what Sutton-Smith called “the domestication of play” where children are no longer asked to go outside to play. Rather, parents attempt to make home the main area for play due to their fear of the unsafe streets as well as potential undesirable company that their children might run into (Sutton-Smith, 1994). In addition, with the development of computers in this recent century, more children are turning to computer or video games as a play activity. While computer games have rules which characterises them as one of the play activities that theoretically should benefit development, there is a “side-effect” of addiction to computers as children become overly interested and engrossed in the computer games. Consequently, addiction to computer games can lead to decreased focus on school work as well as social interaction with family and peers, this seems to demonstrate that play can actually hamper intellectual and social development.

In examining constructive play, where toys are a useful means of creation by children, it has become increasingly common practice in today’s context of growing numbers of dual-income families to use toys as simply a gift to replace the parental bonding that should come along with play. As a result, instead of developing the cognitive skill of expanded creativity, the children are actually left in solitude with their own toys (Sutton-Smith, 1994), which in turn creates a negative impact on the child’s social and emotional development from the lack of parental bonding.

As much as language seems to be a skill that can be well honed with play, it is assumed that the parent or caregiver who is teaching and guiding the play activity is competent in the language. However, this ideal case may not always hold. For instance, in Singapore where there are a substantial number of parents or caretakers who do not speak Standard English, it is likely that they will impart their non-standard English to the children they are playing and communicating with. As such, children will learn what they are exposed to, which fails to develop their language skills in any way.

When differences in cultural context are taken into consideration, play is not necessarily believed to be beneficial to development. A good example would be the Mayan parents, who generally do not promote play activities, but nevertheless, are able to bring up their children to be socially competent. This is particularly so because within the Mayan society, the children are required to undertake adult activities from young when they start to work. In this sense, there seem to be less distinct differences between the child and adult world within the Mayan society, as compared to the western societies for example (Berk, 2006). Thus, the Mayan children can still be socially adept even without the experience of pretend or make-believe play.

Additionally, there has been research and suggestion of play as a form of adjustment rather than preparation. In other words, as opposed to contributing to development, play is simply a behaviour that has been naturally selected to counter stress, for the lack of play does associate with mental illness, depression or social maladjustment (Sutton-Smith, 1994). This seems to point in the direction that the function of play was probably not geared towards benefiting development, although it is indirectly doing so.

In sum, from the available literature that has been gathered so far, the examination of various types of children’s play have been shown to support play as beneficial to development. Nonetheless, it is still limited as a general framework in predicting all development outcomes due to the continuous change in culture and values of society, as well as the existence of cultural variation among societies in viewing the usefulness of play.

References

Athey, I. (1984). Contributions of play to development. In Yawkey, T.D. & Pellegrini, A.D. (Ed.), Child’s Play: Developmental and Applied (pp. 9-27). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Berk, L.E. (2006). Child Development, 7th Ed. United States of America: Pearson Education , Inc.

Garvey, C. (1977). Play, 3rd Ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Pellegrini, A.D. & Jones, I. (1994). Plays, toys and language. In Goldstein, J.H. (Ed.), Toys, play, and child development (pp. 27-45). United States of America: Cambridge University Press.

Singer, J.L. (1994). Imaginative play and adaptive development. In Goldstein, J.H. (Ed.), Toys, play, and child development (pp. 6-26). United States of America: Cambridge University Press.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1994). Does play prepare for the future? In Goldstein, J.H. (Ed.), Toys, play, and child development (pp. 130-146). United States of America: Cambridge University Press.