ABSTRACT
The Swiss polymath Jean Piaget, one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the twentieth century, spent hours observing children at play. He concluded that play lifts children’s thinking to a higher level and helps them make sense of social experiences. But it is only once children start introducing ‘symbols’ – or make-believe – into play, Piaget argued, that it serves this function. It is only then it goes beyond the type of play that animals engage in. ‘The young child during his whole first year, as well as all the
animal species which play, seems to know nothing of make-believe,’ Piaget wrote in Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (Piaget 1962: 154). The type of play that does not involve symbols – like puppies ‘play’ biting other puppies – is what Piaget called ‘practice games’. Only in their second year of life do children start introducing make-
believe into their play. But at this young age their imaginary situation
is very close to reality – children basically reproduce real-life situations. So a child playing with a doll will copy what he or she has seen an adult do. Their thinking is still too limited to develop an imaginary situation that is not merely an imitation of what they have seen in real life. With development, and particularly with the emergence of language, children start creating increasingly complex make-believe scenarios. So, once ‘the symbol’ is introduced into play, Piaget wrote, it ‘goes
far beyond practice’. Children are not merely practising at being adults but making sense of past experiences and learning to be more fully part of the world they live in. ‘Even the game of dolls,’ Piaget writes ‘is much less a pre-exercise of the maternal instinct than an infinitely varied symbolic system’ which, he shows, helps the child make sense of past experiences (Piaget 1962: 154). The role of play in helping children make sense of relationships was
also explored by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In the essay Creative Writers and Day-dreaming, first presented as a lecture in 1907, he drew comparisons between children’s make-believe play and creative writing:
The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
