The Development of Play

David Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134867820
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Play is an important part of our development. In playing, we learn to move, think, speak and imagine, as well as cope with other people. This second edition of The Development of Play addresses these key functions that play serves. David Cohen examines how children play with objects, with language, and most importantly, with each other and their parents. He goes on to ask why we stop playing, and looks at adult games. The Development of Play argues that psychology has accepted too uncritically the Victorian opposition of work and play, and argues that adults can learn to play more.
With its extensive account of recent work in this area, this book is the most up-to-date work on the importance of play and will be of interest to child psychologists, developmental psychologists, and a wide number of professionals involved with children.

1
INTRODUCTION

When I came to London as a boy of nine, I was baffled by some of the 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 game with him. New to this country, 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 the game 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 at the start of this book because psychologists who write about play tend to lapse into a kind of 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 Golding’s macabre Lord of the Flies 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 without any dark side but this romantic attitude has given the extensive psychological literature on play an odd feel. More than in other sections of psychology, studies on play report naturalistic behaviour in detail. There are extended accounts of life in playgroups and in ‘warm home-like laboratories’ (a phrase from a study) of children doing charming things. To read of three year olds playing doctors, nurses, fire engines, space adventurers and so on is entertaining and some children can be acutely critical. 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 raw life, it may be churlish to complain. But these reports also contain assumptions that beg many questions. Usually, play is seen as something children do and adults don’t. Then, while children are presumed to think that play is good fun, wiser adults (especially psychologists) know there’s more to it than that. Play is a learning experience. Piaget 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 play have changed. Unusually, Brian Sutton Smith (1984) has 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 seems to have been no attempt to link a text like Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation 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 seems to have influenced research. Psychologists certainly 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. Groos originated the idea that we play in order to learn and, as we shall see, few people understand now what a reversal this was. Groos made specific links between some games and some skills. This prompted one of the few jokes by the great Genevan psychologist, Jean Piaget. It was unlikely, sniped Piaget, 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 the start of child analysis, gave Groos’ ideas a new interpretation. 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 crucial process and useful tool. In free play, children could express their anxieties. Guide them right and they could use play to conquer these. Klein and Freud were to have a heated dispute about the way analysts could use play but both believed it was an important activity. For both, though, it was a phase; Freud said there was a clear ‘development line’ which was from play to work.

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 the play for the real meaning.

A further assumption is that all children play though social and economic conditions may affect their style. Well, they would all have to play if it is such a major developmental process. In fact, there are non-players and they don’t turn into monsters necessarily. J.S. Mill’s father wanted his son to be educated from birth which meant there was no time to play. J.S. Mill 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 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 as one might the aggressive behaviour of the well-reinforced pigeon? A recent review in Contemporary Psychology snapped that it wasn’t necessary to be humorous about humour research. On the whole, play researchers have been conservative and grave but there have been interesting exceptions. All this argues that we need to look at play from a variety of perspectives.

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 about play will reveal not just the contradictions and confusions surrounding it 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, 1896

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

Jean Piaget, psychologist, 1951

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 a systemic mode of meta-communication. Put simply, as a metacommunicative channel, play has a higher survival value than does ritual.

Don Handleman, psychologist, 1976

[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, 1973

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.

Jean Piaget, psychologist, 1952

. . . in play, the ego aspires to its full expansion.

E. Claparède, psychologist, 1913

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

Anna Freud, psychologist, 1984

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

One could go on and on, as one could go on attempting to define what play is. I deliberately finished with Burghardt’s provocative words for two reasons. First, he provides a perfectly adequate set of working definitions for play and, secondly, he has mainly studied animal play. This book examines play in humans and does not consider, except very occasionally, animal work. It seems generally agreed that detailed studies of chimpanzee play such as Jane Lawick Goodall (1968) reveal that they use play both to improve manual skills and to practise social skills. Fagen (1981) has stressed that play leads to many reciprocal encounters in which apes learn to co-operate. He concludes that ‘it is most fruitful to look for social play as a source of certain kinds of flexible skills’. The psychology of human play involves many aspects that animal studies do not touch – such as the use of toys, the role of pretending and the impact of cultural fashions. The complex and cultural nature of human play makes animal analogies only of limited use. With so much research to make sense of, I have deliberately excluded any detailed analysis of animal work though it seems clear that human infants also derive manual and social skills through play. But they derive much more besides. 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 offers the following useful defining characteristics. Play has:

(i) no obvious immediate function

(ii) a pleasing effect

(iii) is sequentially variable

(iv) is stimulus seeking

(v) is quick and energetically expensive behaviour

(vi) involves exaggerated, incompetent or awkward movements

(vii) is most prevalent in juveniles

(viii) has special ‘play’ signals

(ix) has a background in role relationships

(x) is marked by a relative absence of threat or submission

(xi) is marked by a relative absence of final consummatory behaviour.

Some of Burghardt’s points fit animals better than people. Children do not always move awkwardly when they play. 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 makes something of the lack of real threat or submission. With human beings it is more complicated. Freud suggested long ago that jokes allowed real hostility to surface in a socially acceptable way. The bitchy repartee is a real put-down but acceptable. Observations of children indicate that they often are hostile in their play but they know that the gloss of a game makes it likely they will get away with it. Despite such quibbles, Burghardt draws attention to some useful boundaries between play and ‘not-play’. It seems possible to accept that play does involve a varied set of activities and behaviours. Not every instance of play needs to fulfil all the criteria (i) to (xi). Many forms will only cover some of them while being recognised easily as play. Burghardt also does not help much in describing moments of transition such as when a child shifts from walking down to the street to galloping like a horse. Usually, there is no difficulty in recognising when children are playing. And children themselves experience no difficulty in knowing when they’re playing – but psychologists have to ask them first. I doubt if it is possible to gell a perfect definition of play precisely because it is such a wide behaviour.

There are many ways of playing play.

Despite the variety of quotations – and, of course, many more could be culled – the literature on play tends to one of three traditions. The most influential today is probably the Piagetian one. As McCune-Nicolich has noted (1984), Piaget was one of the few psychologists to map in detail the development of imitation and play in his children over a long period of time. It ought to be said that Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood is, compared to others of Piaget’s books, both accessible and fairly short on observations. In plotting the growth of intelligence, Piaget seemed to make notes virtually every day – certainly every month – on new things his children did. With play, there are huge gaps between observations. Piaget notes the play behaviour of J and L at three-month, even six-month, intervals. Interesting as the material is, it is not as thorough as his cognitive work. Nevertheless, as McCune-Nicolich points out, it is a seminal contribution. Psychologists who approach play in the Piagetian tradition tend to focus on what children do with objects, the point at which they can use an object for something else (say, an eggshell to be a spoon) and the relationship between play and exploration.

Piaget commented on Freud’s ideas about play and accepted that, for the very young child, play was totally gratifying to the ego. The demands of reality did not intrude. Play should fade away, Piaget believed, as the child became more competent at coping with real objects, and real situations, in the real world.

The second tradition has been closely linked to psychoanalysis. It concentrates on what emotions are expressed in play and, also, on how play can be used to heal. These two traditions have tended to function in isolation – few studies even now ask how a child’s cognitive ‘level’ of play is linked to his emotional development – but they do share one prejudice. For Piaget and for Freud, only children play. Any adult who larked about in a funny hat would be a candidate for the funny farm or, in Piaget’s case, for a severe dose of logic. Freud claimed that the human task was to learn to be able to love and to work. Not much room for play there. Piaget went to some length to explain why some adults persisted in playing organised games. But, of course, to play tennis is not to play in quite the same way. Nor is to play the Stock Exchange. The play of adults is, by tradition, rather limited.

The third tradition is an educational one. Much of the early work on play was done not by psychologists but by educationalists like Froebel and Montessori. They wanted to see not why children played but what play could be used for. Initially, many of these workers wanted to liberate what was best in the child through free play. But, as Sutton Smith has observed, $100 million were spent in America on building playgrounds between 1890 and 1990. That was not because American society wanted to foster the sweet bird of liberty in its young. Rather, social leaders hoped to train youngsters, especially working-class youngsters, to take their place in American society and become productive members of it. Studies of playgroups since 1920 have tended, usually without much awareness of it, to accept the fact that play ought to be used to certain ends. Children ought to learn how to co-operate, to share things and, of course, to obey wiser adults. There is much descriptive literature on what happens in playgroups but rather less writing on why adults have created and run corrective playgroups. There were social engineers on the swings.

As a result of these independent traditions, the literature on play has tended to be rather fragmented. There are some useful introductory texts such as Millar’s Play (published in 1968) and now a little out of date) and Garvey’s Play (1977). But most books on the subject tend to be collections of essays in which authors with different special interests concentrate on them and offer few connections to the rest of the literature. A good example of this trend is Yawkey and Pellegrini’s (1984) Child’s Play, Developmental and Applied. Their authors include many contemporary authorities like Sutton Smith, McCune-Nicolich, Fein, McGhee, Curry and Arnaud, and Schwartzman. There are chapters on pretend play, the play of handicapped children, humour, exploration, the uses (and misuses) of objects, playschools and, even, play in the hospital setting. The list may be comprehensive but Yawkey devotes just 7 out of 370 pages to any general introduction and most of that is taken up with listing what the following chapters are about.

Since Piaget wrote his book on play, there has been a vast amount of research on the subject. For reviews, see Garvey (1977), Mayles (1990), and Singer and Singer (1990). I believe it’s both possible and useful to offer a coherent account of the state of our knowledge about play – and the implications of that.

I also wanted to write this book because of two previous pieces of research. First, I did my Ph.D. thesis on the development of laughter basing most of it on following what made my children laugh over four years. Secondly, in a critique of Piaget, I have argued that his theory, valuable as it is, focused far too much on how children reacted to things and far too little on how they reacted to people and, especially, to their parents. Some of these criticisms may be useful in looking at play as there is a need to integrate different approaches. Play is not either cognitive or social or emotional. When children play, they often combine all these faculties.

Psychologists have played the game of play research in some curious, even defensive, ways. I’m not being offensively flippant in describing it as a game; much work in the philosophy of science since Kuhn (1962) has stressed that science is a game with its own rules. Two of the traditional approaches emphasise research in controlled situations, either the laboratory (which can be dolled up to look playful) or the consulting room. The playgroup is somewhat less controlled, of course, though researchers often impose their own restrictions on what slices of play they study. More than most psychologists, students of play have ventured into homes but they often feel compelled to turn these into mini-labs for they bring with them a bag of approved toys (in case the ones people have don’t suit) as well as much techno-baggage such as video cameras, tape-recorders, electronic bleepers and so on. Mothers are sometimes given bells to ring to signal the start of the experimental period. The experts, as Belsky (1981) has admitted, are rarely content to observe playful behaviour as it happens. They catalyse it or limit it. McCune-Nicolich and Fenson (1984), for example, often do a ‘warm up’ visit to set mothers and infants at ease a week before they actually do their video with toys they provide. The observation period lasts 30 minutes. Psychologists control to an unnatural degree the setting and tools with which the play they observe occurs. Is 30 minutes enough? Why not use the toys on site? Belsky (1981) even constructed a twelve-stage model of the development of play using such short bursts of observation.

Play researchers acknowledge that children play with their mothers and a few pioneers like Clarke Stewart (1978) even accept that father makes three but the methodologies remain odd. As a result, the way a child develops his, or her, play in his, or her, home with parents, siblings, neighbourhood friends has barely been studied. The convenient assumption is that play in the lab or the home or the nursery class is much t...