- Play is essential to the young child's health.
- Play increases affiliation with peers
- releases tension
- advances cognitive development
- increases exploration
- provides a safe haven in which to engage in potentially dangerous behaviour.
For Freud and Erikson, play is an essential useful form of human adjustment, helping the child master anxieties and conflicts. Because tensions are relieved in play, the child can cope with life's problems.
Piaget believes that play advances children's cognitive development. Play permits children to practise their competencies and acquired skills in a relaxed, pleasurable way.
Vygotsky also believes that play is an excellent setting for cognitive development, especially the symbolic and make-believe aspects of play, as when a child substitutes a stick for a horse and rides the stick as if it were a horse.
Daniel Berlyne (1960) described play as being exciting and pleasurable in itself because it satisfies the exploratory drive in each of us. This drive involves curiosity and a desire for information about something new or unusual. Play encourages this exploratory behaviour by offering children the possibilities of novelty, complexity, uncertainty, surprise, and incongruity (Santrock, 1999, p. 240).
Mildred Parten (1932) developed the following classification of children's play:
- Unoccupied play occurs when the child is not engaging in play as it is commonly understood. The child may stand in one spot, look around the room, or perform random movements that do not seem to have a goal.
- Solitary play occurs when the child plays alone and independently of others. Two- and three-year-olds engage more frequently in solitary play than older preschoolers do.
- Onlooker play occurs when the child watches other children play. The child's active interest in other children's play distinguishes onlooker play from unoccupied play.
- Parallel play occurs when the child plays separately from others, but with toys like those the others are using or in a manner that mimics their play.
- Associative play occurs when play involves social interaction with little or no organization. In this type of play children seem to be more interested in each other than in the tasks they are performing.
- Cooperative play involves social interaction in a group with a sense of group identity and organized activity. Little cooperative play is seen in the preschool years (Santrock, 1999, p. 241).
Whereas Parten's categories emphasize the role of play in the child's social world, the contemporary perspective on play emphasizes both the cognitive and social aspects of play.
- Sensorimotor play is behaviour engaged in by infants to derive pleasure from exercising their existing sensorimotor schemas. Infants initially engage in exploratory and playful visual and motor transactions in the second quarter of the first year of life. By nine months of age, infants begin to choose novel objects for exploration and play, especially objects that are responsive such as toys that make noise or bounce. By 12 months of age, infants enjoy making things work and exploring cause and effect. At this point in development, children like toys that perform when they act on them.
- Pretense/Symbolic play Between nine and 30 months of age, children increase their use of objects in symbolic play. They learn to transform objects, substituting them for other objects and acting toward them as if they were these other objects. Dramatic play or "make-believe" often appears at about 18 months of age and reaches a peak at about four or five years of age, then gradually declines. In the second year, infants begin to understand the social meaning of objects. For example, two-year-olds may distinguish between exploratory play that is interesting but not humorous, and “playful” play which has incongruous and humorous dimensions.
- Social play is play that involves social interactions with peers. Parten's categories are oriented towards social play.
- Constructive play combines sensorimotor/practice repetitive play with symbolic representation of ideas. Constructive play occurs when children engage in self-regulated creation or construction of a product or a problem solution (Santrock, 1999, p. 241).
Information from: Saskatchewan Evergreen Curriculum