ABSTRACT
This chapter comments on the chapters by Rowe, Sawyer and DeZutter, and Smith. These chapters have enormous potential to impact the fields of child development and early childhood education. Although the study of the role of social pretend play and early reading goes back over 30 years, those early studies were rather global and did not identify specific processes in play that predicted early literacy. It is crucial to define very explicitly what is meant by play and literacy to establish links between the two constructs. Good ideas usually take the form of theories that attempts to make us understand complex phenomena. The worth of these ideas should be determined by the degree to which they explain the relation between children's play and their literacy. One way to define play is to simply categorize all that children do as play. Such an orientation is a direct result of the recognition that children are qualitatively different from adults.
