ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the incident of the Flying Cucumber because it seems to illustrate some of the more interesting aspects of play that much current research bypasses. It looks at the most basic kind of play that children engage in with other children – rough and tumble play. Playing Super Cat Girls also helped the children to develop social skills. Far more boys take part in rough and tumble play than do girls. Studies of girls and rough and tumble play are rarer. At 24 months, few children use emotional words spontaneously. There has been other work which examines the way in which children learn about emotions through play. B. Sodian found that 3-year-olds could predict the next move an adult or a child would make in a game but found it hard to induce false belief. The chapter argues that people have partly useful descriptions of the stages of pretending that children go through.