ABSTRACT
In talking about people and their role as playthings for a baby, they have in mind mainly the child's own family, since babies are usually brought up in families. Taken to its limits, people might imagine a new generation of super-babies programmed by computers from birth to play and learn at maximum potential. The kind of research people shows quite clearly, however, that these early exchanges of looks and murmurs are a form of social play which has a central role in the child's progression through the early stages of intellectual and emotional development. In talking about the hand as a toy, people used the phrase 'hook the child's attention'; watching mothers trying to use a toy in play with their babies at the stage when the baby prefers his mother's face to any toy, there is very much the feeling of an angler 'playing' a fish.
