The Development Of Play

David Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351349222
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why is play so important in child development? Are children in today's society suffering from a lack of time for free play, with the emerging dominance of screen play? Can play therapy help to uncover, rescue and rehabilitate children living in abusive environments, or even in war-torn countries? Is play also important for adult development?

Play is a learning experience and a crucial component to childhood development as it allows children to emulate the behaviours of those around them and to develop their social skills. In this engaging book, David Cohen examines how children play with objects, language, each other, and their parents to reveal how play enables children to learn how to move, think independently, speak and imagine. Cohen suggests that much of our formative experiences of play informs our future selves, and explores how play can help us to become better parents.

This new edition of The Development of Play offers a fascinating review of the importance of play in all our lives. It includes the latest research on the impact of digital technology, brain development, cultural differences in play and toys, and also looks at why parents sometimes choose different toys for girls and boys. The book also provides advice and guidance on how parents can play creatively and imaginatively with their children. It is essential reading for Early Years, health care and education professionals as well as undergraduate students in developmental psychology and education.

1
Introduction

As I revised this book in March 2018, Channel 4 News broadcast harrowing images of the suburb of al-Ghouta outside Damascus being bombed. Amid the rubble, children were playing, as they always do – and have always done. The Romans said to err is human. So is to play if you are a child.

I was particularly interested in the Channel 4 News as in the summer of 2017, I was filming on the Israeli Syrian border explaining the medical help Israeli hospitals give to some Syrians, a story the Israelis for years kept ‘under the radar’. The government feared it might upset supporters of the right-wing Likud party. So the news that, since 2013, Israeli hospitals have treated some 800 Syrian children who have been victims of the civil war leaked out slowly.

Some Syrians were too traumatised to play; their symptoms were similar to shell shock. The hospitals have had to innovate. Clown therapy is one such innovation. A fully qualified therapist, who happens also to be a fully qualified clown with a doctorate in making farting noises, tries to amuse and relax the children. I filmed Dr ‘Coco’ as he blew up balloons, made funny noises and mimed frantically. Some children remained withdrawn but, for some, it helped them thaw and eventually talk about their fears.

The world has changed radically since the first edition of this book in 1987 when no one questioned that play was an unqualified good. In 2018, Matt Hancock, then the British Secretary of State for Culture, warned that the government might impose limits on screen time for children. Play was not always good for mental health. He was at once criticised because he did not specify what kind of screen time might be harmful. This new edition, therefore, does not just cover new research but tries to place it in context in a world of many anxieties. Hancock made one imagine some government inspector who ruled that your child has exceeded the permitted time for playing. The punishment? No one could guess. Shades of Orwell’s Big Brother.

Change has happened in many cultures. We used to think the Japanese were devoted to work. Yet in a survey of 2,000 Japanese men and women conducted by Central Research Services in 2010, just 31 per cent of subjects considered work as their ikigai, their way to happiness. This is a change from the days when Japanese men especially were company men. Interest developed in 2001 when Capcom teamed up with Bandai to bring the mighty Mobile Suit Gundam to the Japanese arcades as an arena versus game. To show how important Gundam is in Japan and through most of Asia, imagine that Star Wars had babies with Star Trek. Then imagine that in turn created a sprawling trans-media empire with an 18-metre life-size replica towering over its excitable fan base. To say that Gundam dwarfs most of its global competition is both a figurative and literal truth.

Inevitably revising a book first written 30 years ago means making hard choices. I could have been more ruthless in removing reports of research done long ago. There is some value, however, in analysing how we have come to our current state of knowledge, so I have retained some historical material which seems valuable still.

This book is also personal because I was a child once. I was aware of the ambivalent nature of games when I came to London as a boy of nine. I was baffled by some games English children played. Cricket was a total mystery but, at least, it didn’t seem dangerous. Far more threatening was a game called Double or Quits. The fat boy who lived in the flat above ours insisted I play this with him. New to England, I didn’t dare refuse because I wanted to be accepted. I didn’t dare admit either that I never understood the rules as FatBoy wielded them. The way we played I could never quit and never win. Often, at the end of an hour’s playing, I was seething with frustration while FatBoy grinned in ecstasy. I never discovered how to play Double or Quits and so, in the end, I avoided meeting him. I mention this experience because psychologists who write about play tend to lapse into romantic smugness. Playing is wonderful, fun, golden, innocent. Play is how we learn to handle the world and our social roles in it; play teaches and heals. The way some psychologists write, you would imagine that what the children in William Golding’s macabre The Lord of the Flies (1954) needed was a good dose of play therapy. Then, they would have acted out their fantasies instead of, well, acting out their fantasies.

Playing is, of course, often fun and light but this romantic attitude has given the extensive psychological literature on play an odd feel. More than most psychology, studies on play report naturalistic behaviour in detail. There are extended accounts of playgroups and of children in ‘warm home-like laboratories’ (a phrase from a study) doing charming things. To read of 3-year-old children playing doctors, nurses, fire persons, space adventurers and so on is entertaining, and some children can be sharp as pins. One wily boy refused to pretend a colander was a shoe ‘because that’s too silly to be a shoe’. All this yields good data. Since psychologists have often been blamed for providing too little raw data from real life, it may be churlish to complain.

However, these reports also contain many questionable assumptions. Usually, play is seen as something children do – and adults don’t. This is especially odd as entertainment economists suggest in 2017 that the worldwide market for video and computer games is worth £108 billion. Many players are adults. Then, while children are presumed to think that play is fun, wiser adults (especially psychologists) know there’s more to it than that. Play is a learning experience.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) argued that, as children get older, they reject the sillier games of childhood in favour of more realistic pursuits. Fantasy is a stage one grows out of.

Most texts on play do not investigate the origins of such assumptions, even though it is quite clear that historical attitudes both to children and to play have changed. Unusually, Brian Sutton Smith (2003) claimed that Western societies have used play to make children conform and prepare them for their role in capitalism. It is certainly odd that there seem to have been no attempts to link a text like Marcuse’s (1959) Eros and Civilization to the subject. Before flower power, Marcuse claimed that capitalism did not dare allow adults real pleasure. Surplus repression was used to keep us in check. The notion that play is sinful stems from the Puritans and still influences research. Psychologists seem to accept that while play may appear frivolous, it has to have a proper, serious explanation. It cannot just be; it has to have a purpose.

The paradox – let’s be serious about play – has not been commented on much since Groos (1896) claimed that we had a long childhood so that we could play and that we played to ‘pre-exercise’ skills we would need as adults. He made specific links between some games and some skills. This prompted one of the few jokes Piaget made. It was unlikely, he sniped, that when a baby dropped a rattle, it was pre-exercising its grasp of gravity and the laws of physics. Did Newton play much with apples? The growth of psychoanalysis, and child analysis, gave Groos’ ideas a new twist. Emotional skills rather than cognitive ones were being rehearsed. Freud made only fleeting references to play, but from the 1920s, analysts like Susan Isaacs, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein saw it as a useful tool. In free play, children could express their anxieties – and conquer them. The sandpit was the way to sanity. Klein and Freud were to quarrel about the way analysts could use play but both believed it was important. For both, though, it was a phase; Freud said there was a clear ‘development line’ which was from play to work.

Recently, politicians have put play on the agenda. On 15 February 2011, the European Commission presented ‘An EU agenda for the Rights of the Child’. The document asked for: ‘A renewed commitment of all actors is necessary to bring to life the vision of a world where children can be children and can safely live, play, learn, develop their full potential, and make the most of all existing opportunities’.

Three months later, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on Early Years Learning which said that ‘all children have the right to rest, leisure and play’. Eight days later, the Council of the European Union weighed in with a promise to promote awareness and change attitudes regarding children’s play. The International Play Association (IPA), Ludemos – Latin for we shall play; – and the International Toy Library Association (ITLA) recommended national and international policy changes. Play has become politically correct.

A book on play should be playful in places at least. In that spirit, I will call those who study the subject play-niks. Today many fret about finding ways of allowing children to experience risk in a world which often feels unsafe. In his paper, Whitebread (2012) found that the European play researchers worried ‘understandably, in the view of our play experts, parents, carers and teachers today, across Europe, are becoming too risk-averse, and so over-supervise and over-schedule children to the detriment of their play experiences’. Sandseter et al. (2016) discussing a new Framework for kindergartens in Norway argued that risky play gives children an exhilarating positive emotion and exposes them ‘to stimuli they previously have feared. As the child’s coping skills improve, these situations and stimuli may be mastered and no longer be feared’. She worried that ‘we may observe an increased neuroticism or psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age adequate risky play’.

This new edition therefore discusses the latest work on play in the light of these anxieties. The previous editions said too little about the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, an omission rectified here.

Return to the paradox. Play cannot just be; it has to have a purpose. Otherwise, biology would not have permitted its evolution. The task, therefore, brave psychologist, is to burrow beneath play for its real meaning. Sutton-Smith (2003) in The Ambiguity of Play was inspired to look at play in ways suggested by William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949). Sutton-Smith offered seven different rhetorics, including play as progress, play as fate as in gambling, play as power as in sports, play as identity, play as imaginary, and play as merely frivolous. He argued that the rhetoric of progress has taken over the way we see play – the child must play to master skills – and that this has perhaps obscured other aspects of play. Impressively Sutton-Smith listed over a hundred uses of the word play from playing with fire to playing Shakespeare to playing charades. (He omitted, though, the sexual dimension of play, as in playing with oneself.)

A further assumption is that all children play. Well, they would all have to play if it is such a major developmental process. Current orthodoxy argues that autistic children are very poor at pretend play, however. In fact, children who play little don’t turn into monsters necessarily. The philosopher J.S. Mill’s father wanted his son to be educated from birth, which meant there was no time for play. The son could never remember playing. In his autobiography, the philosopher noted: ‘Of children’s books any more than of playthings I had scarcely any, except an occasional gift from a relative or acquaintance’. This deprivation does not seem to have hampered Mill except that he reckoned it made him bad with his hands. He could deal with people, politics and philosophy but – probably – not with the plumbing.

These assumptions and paradoxes may affect psychologists more than they admit. As it is a science, they/we are meant to be objective. But these cultural legacies prompt awkward, and often unasked, questions. Should one be playful about studying play or should one treat it with scientific seriousness, as if we were studying the aggressive behaviour of the well-conditioned pigeon? A review in Contemporary Psychology snapped that it wasn’t necessary to be humorous about humour research.

To show how serious I am about being playful about play, there will be an interlude before getting on to the introductory ritual of explaining what is in this book and why it is necessary to add to the literature. A few quotations will reveal not just the contradictions and confusions surrounding play but the range of writers who have bothered to think about it without satisfying themselves (let alone others) that they have cracked the problem:

The function of play has been commented on for many centuries, to little avail.

(Erving Goffman, sociologist, 1976)

Play is a child’s life and the means by which he comes to understand the world he lives in.

(Susan Isaacs, psychoanalyst, 1933)

Animals are young so that they may play.

(Karl Groos, comparative psychologist,

We can be sure that all happenings, pleasant or unpleasant, in the child’s life, will have repercussions on her dolls

(Jean Piaget, psychologist, 1952)

In attempting to interpret the play of infants one must bear in mind the love of nonsense and tomfoolery.

(C. W. Valentine, psychologist, 1942)

[Play] is one of those concepts that Wittgenstein might have said is wrapped in so much toilet paper, it looks round. The cutting edges have been dulled.

(Gregory Stone, sociologist, 1981)

The motives of play are various and, often, complex and they cannot be characterised by any brief formula; nor can any hard and fast line be drawn between work and play.

(William MacDougall, psychologist, 1919)

Generally speaking there is continuity between a child’s play and work.

Piaget, psychologist, 1952)

[In] play, the ego aspires to its full expansion.

Claparède, psychologist, 1913)

Fantasy play can reveal a great deal of material, but any kind of play can be used defensively.

(Anna Freud, psychoanalyst, 1984)

Play therapy was able to reduce hyperactivity in rats suffering from attention deficit.

(J. Panksepp, psychologist, 2005)

And we must not forget:

The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

(Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, sc. 2)

The Bard was clearly an early advocate of play therapy.

And let’s finish this fandango with;

Play originated from boredom and deteriorated behaviour, an outrageous speculation that may, after all, be true of the writer and his thesis.

(Gordon M. Burghardt, psychologist, 1984)

I ended with Burghardt’s provocative words for two reasons. First, he provides an adequate set of working definitions for play and, second, he has mainly studied animal play. This book examines play in humans and does not consider, except very occasionally, animal play. It seems generally agreed that studies of chimpanzee play such as Jane Lawick Goodall’s (1968) reveal that they use play both to improve manual skills and to practice social skills. Fagen (1981) stressed that play leads to many encounters in which apes learn to cooperate. He concludes that ‘it is most fruitful to look for social play as a source of certain kinds of flexible skills’.

Animals differ from us. They do not use toys, do not pretend and are not influenced by cultural fashions. But now we have ethologists looking at the first two of these with work on whether chimps can pretend (Savage Rumbaugh 2001). In the second edition of this book I quipped that the smartest chimp going does not seem to act out being King Kong because he is nervous of how well he’ll do on the rugby field.

Looking both at animal and at human play, Burghardt (1984) offers the following useful defining characteristics. Play

• has no obvious immediate function
• has a pleasing effect
• is sequentially variable
• is stimulus seeking
• is quick and energetically expensive behaviour
• involves exaggerated, incompetent or awkward movements
• is most prevalent in juveniles
• has special ‘play’ signals
• has a background in role relationships
• is marked by a relative absence of threat or submission
• is marked by a relative absence of final consummatory behaviour.

Some of Burghardt’s points fit animals better than people, in fact. Children do not always move awkwardly when they play, for example. In a Wendy House or clambering up a climbing frame, children can move normally or, even, gracefully. Pouring sand into containers also does not seem to be expensive in energy terms. Burghardt (1984) makes something of the lack of real threat or submission. With human beings it is more complicated. Freud suggested that jokes allowed real hostility to surface in a socially acceptable way. The bitchy repartee is a real put-down but acceptable. Children often are hostile in their play but by the age of three, they know that the veneer that it is a gam...