Child growth and development

¶ … Childhood Play Styles

Benefits of Childhood Play

Play in infancy is common to most higher forms of mammalian species and it complexity and importance corresponds to intelligence. In the most general sense, play is the way that animals (including human beings) practice behaviors that they will have to rely upon as adults. The more intellectually advanced the species, the more complex social behaviors are; since human relationships are highly developed, a tremendous amount of human childhood play necessarily relates to practicing interpersonal relationships, communication skills, and to personality development and role identity formation.

Mildred Parten's Types of Play

Early in the 20th century, Mildred Parten studied young children between the ages of 2 and 5 years old by carefully observing the way they played. She identified 6 specific styles of play and analyzed their relevance to childhood development. She noted that one of the most significant patterns was that younger children tended to play in a more solitary fashion and that older children were typically much more involved in joint play. More specifically, Parten categorized younger children as progressing through 4 stage of increasingly social play.

Generally, only some of the youngest children exhibit unoccupied play in which their activities are purposeless and random. More often, younger children less than 3 years old engaged in solitary play in which they paid attention only on their objects of immediate interest without noticing or interacting with other children. The next stage of play, onlooker play, was still solitary but involved watching and communicating about (or with) other children without actually playing with them. The next stage was parallel play in which children copy one another or play with the same toy but without necessarily playing together.

Older children in this same age group tended to exhibit associative play in which they interacted actively with other children and cooperative play in which they collaborated in games or in taking on roles with respect to others in the group.

Dramatic Play and Characteristic Gender-Based Differences in Play

Dramatic play provides children with the opportunity to experiment with various identities with which they are familiar and to develop valuable social skills by practicing social interactions and roles. Some of the most important elements of dramatic play involve practicing the behavioral roles and norms associated with gender differences. Typically, boys play actively, physically, and with gross motor movement activities whereas girls are more likely to spend time in play that emphasizes direct communications and verbal interaction. Boys are also more likely to pursue competitive games whereas girls are more frequently involved in collaborative activities that emphasize mutual cooperation.