Child Psychology: A Very Short Introduction by Usha Goswami

Author:Usha Goswami
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199646593
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Pretend play with carers helps psychological understanding

Pretend play provides an important avenue for understanding mental states. Pretend play can be solitary, or with an adult carer, or with other children. A lot of pretend play with siblings and other children is social play. Children will ‘play’ at being mummy and daddy, or ‘play’ at being sisters, or ‘play’ domestic scenes like cooking a meal, or ‘play’ going to school. Imagining these situations and gaining some control over what happens in them via playing appears to be very important for child development.

Pretend play with mothers and adult carers is different from pretend play with other children, but both are important. Pretend play with adult carers is often object-focused. For example, adult and child may pretend to be on the telephone to each other, but the ‘telephone’ may be a banana. This kind of pretence enables children to ‘decouple’ the actual object (the yellow, curved banana) from the symbolized object (the telephone receiver). Pretend play around objects helps children to ‘quarantine’ the real nature of the objects from their symbolic nature. The child can have two mental representations of the same entity at once.

Although pretending with objects begins by being closely tied to the real nature of the objects (e.g., giving a doll a pretend drink from the child’s own cup, or from a toy cup), during the second year of life it becomes more abstract. A curled leaf may become a cup. In psychological terms, pretending enables the creation of ‘symbols in thought’. An object has a role in a pretend game not because of what it actually is, but because of what it symbolizes in that game. A stick might become a horse—in thought, the stick is a horse. In this sense, the emergence of pretend play marks the beginning of a capacity to understand one’s own cognitive processes—to understand thoughts as entities.

Older 2-year-olds will plan pretend games in advance, and search out the desired props. Young children also imitate the pretend play of their carers. Their pretence is generally more sophisticated when an adult is one of the players. Indeed, Vygotsky argued that adults can play an important role in initiating or extending socio-dramatic play for learning purposes (see Chapter 7). Adults can guide play so that it becomes, in Vygotsky’s words, ‘a micro-world of active experiencing of social roles and relationships’. In Vygotsky’s theory of child development, teacher-guided play is an important mechanism for education, as it can support cognitive rather than purely social development.

Another important aspect of pretence is sharing mental states. For example, if a stick has become a horse in the game, this only works because all the players in the game ‘agree’ that the stick is a horse. Hence pretend play shares with language communicative intentions. The players in the game share the intention that the stick symbolizes a horse, just as partners in a conversation share the intention that abstract sound patterns (spoken words) symbolize certain meanings. In this way, pretend play fosters the development of a symbolic capacity, which appears to be unique to humans.

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