From Science Daily: 

“Making play sets more interactive and giving children with autism greater opportunities to control and add content of their own to the game could improve cooperative play with other children as well as giving them greater confidence in understanding how objects interact.

William Farr and Nicola Yuill of the University of Sussex, UK and Steve Hinske of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, explain that children with autism are often affected not only by social difficulties, but also have an impaired understanding of the way objects interact. They have investigated how toys, such as the “Augmented Knight’s Castle” (AKC) might be adapted to be more beneficial to those children and perhaps even act as a therapeutic tool. 

Writing in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, the team,from the Children and Technology Lab at the University of Sussex explains how they have examined childhood playexplains how they have examined childhood play with the popular Playmobil Knight’s Castle play set, which as the name would suggest comprises a toy castle with various obvious components of towers, parapets, a moat and the various model people that can be used in imaginative play to enact various roles within the play set.

The team has thus augmented the play set by adding a wireless networking system and radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) to the components to add feedback and programmable aspects to the play set. The play set might thus produce sound or movement given certain actions by the child playing with the toys. Their tests with autistic children volunteered to play with the AKC reveal promising results that are allowing the team to conclude that such adapted play sets can improve understanding and interest in the play set itself, but more importantly boost the level of interaction with other children playing with the toys. Indeed, the team noticed more parallel and cooperative play and less solitary play with the fully configurable setup for the AKC. They add that autistic children playing with the configurable AKC were also more inclined to actively play with the Playmobil figures.”

This is an interesting concept. I can almost imagine how adding some multi-sensory feedback mechanisms might encourage or even enhance the kind of exploratory play that develops a strong and varied database of object affordances (i.e. cause/effect relationship between an object and its potential purpose), but as an OT and toy connoisseur, I can’t help but feel a bit skeptical, since there already exists a world of readily available toys that can be used in the context of supported play. 

What the researchers are attempting to address is agency: the implict knowledge that one’s purposeful actions have the ability to influence or impact on their environment. (This is, in essence, a primary focus of our approach.) However, I can’t help but think that the researchers have re-invented an unnecessarily complex wheel.

To illustrate my point, I’m pretty sure we have the Playmobil castle floating around the office somewhere; it’s a really fantastic toy for the very few children we see who have good constructional praxis, executive functioning to sustain attention and organize many detailed pieces, fine motor coordination to assemble the toy, fine motor control to manipulate the toy, and emotional regulation to manage the inevitable frustration of mistakes and pieces falling apart. 

As an alternative, we might select the Imaginext castle, which also affords a wide range of imaginative ideas, but has pieces that are larger, more distinctly detailed, and moving parts that are more specific in their purpose. For kids with mild challenges, this provides an appropriate level of challenge while still allowing them to feel successful enough to move from exploratory play to representational and symbolic ideas. 

To further reduce the motor demands, we might choose the Fisher Price Little People (I strongly prefer the vintage version), again, providing toys that provide the developmentally appropriate level of motor challenge to allow the child to demonstrate their ideas. 

It’s also just as likely that we might transform a playhouse into a castle, provide foam swords and stuffed dragons… you get the idea. 

First of all, I’m highly skeptical about the efficacy of prescribing a particular toy to facilitate the development of a sense of agency; by definition, this must be driven by the child’s own innate interests, ideas, and motivation. It seems to me that it would be more effective to consider the child’s natural interests, then match the toy or activity to the child’s individual differences, i.e. their capacity for visual spatial processing, fine motor control and coordination… and then to consider what kind of support might be provided to facilitate their ability to express their ideas, rather than evaluating their ability to play with a toy “appropriately.”

Read the full article here. 

This is from a New York Times Op-Ed piece from Peggy Orenstein:

Among the “10 characteristics for Lego” described in 1963 by a son of the founder was that it was “for girls and for boys,” as Bloomberg Businessweek reported. But the new Friends collection, Lego says, was based on months of anthropological research revealing that — gasp! — the sexes play differently.

While as toddlers they interact similarly with the company’s Duplo blocks, by preschool girls prefer playthings that are pretty, exude “harmony” and allow them to tell a story. They may enjoy building, but they favor role play. So it’s bye-bye Bionicles, hello princesses. In order to be gender-fair, today’s executives insist, they have to be gender-specific.

As any developmental psychologist will tell you, those observations are, to a degree, correct. Toy choice among young children is the Big Kahuna of sex differences, one of the largest across the life span. It transcends not only culture but species: in two separate studies of primates, in 2002 and 2008, researchers found that males gravitated toward stereotypically masculine toys (like cars and balls) while females went ape for dolls. Both sexes, incidentally, appreciated stuffed animals and books.

Human boys and girls not only tend to play differently from one another — with girls typically clustering in pairs or trios, chatting together more than boys and playing more cooperatively — but, when given a choice, usually prefer hanging with their own kind.

Every experience, every interaction, every activity — when they laugh, cry, learn, play — strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others, and the younger the child the greater the effect. Consider: boys from more egalitarian homes are more nurturing toward babies. Meanwhile, in a study of more than 5,000 3-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both girls and boys with older sisters.

Score one for Lego, right? Not so fast. Preschoolers may be the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police, eager to enforce and embrace the most rigid views. Yet, according Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that’s also the age when their brains are most malleable, most open to influence on the abilities and roles that traditionally go with their sex.

Traditionally, toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences? What do girls learn about who they should be from Lego kits with beauty parlors or the flood of “girl friendly” science kits that run the gamut from “beauty spa lab” to “perfume factory”?

At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine. And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial. There is even evidence that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers.

While I think there’s merit in advocating for more gender-neutral marketing and packaging of toys (I have more than once ranted to anyone who will listen about how Scientific American magazine can be found only on the “Men’s Interest” rack at SeaTac airport), as someone who has an interest in both toys and development, I’m less concerned with the specific traits of the object and more interested in helping children explore the full range of emotional themes and developing ideas with creativity and complexity. Certainly there are toys that more readily afford this, but toys are only the medium through which a child expresses their own ideas and emotional life. I’ve witnessed (and been) a pink-clad princess who fights off mean witches and defeats crocodiles and observed a tender moment between superheroes. The limitation is not in the toys or in the child, but in the expectation of them. 

The headline fails to capture the most interesting aspect of this study, specifically, that it’s not enough to simply provide the child opportunities for playing with blocks, but that working collaboratively in guided play helps to develop spatial language and introduce spatial concepts. 

“There is evidence that variations in the spatial language young children hear, which directs their attention to important aspects of the spatial environment, may be one of the mechanisms that contribute to differences in spatial ability,” says Newcombe, who is also the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), headquartered at Temple.

To investigate how play affects variations in language, investigators observed children and parents in one of three situations: in “free” play, where the subjects are encouraged to play with the blocks as they would at home; in “preassembled” play, where the subject are given blocks that have been glued together in a preformed, fixed structure; and in “guided” play, where the subjects are given the blocks along with graphic instructions for creating a particular structure.

Parents in the guided play condition produced significantly higher proportions of spatial talk than parents in the other two conditions, and children in the guided play condition produced significantly more spatial talk than those in the free play condition.

“This study gives parents news they can use. It shows that, rather than leaving kids alone with a preassembled activity, interactive play that draws out conversation is best at facilitating spatial development,” Newcombe said. 

Read the article here. 

This headline is, obviously, from The Onion.

While I see the humor, I suspect that this is often how adults perceive the complex and multi-faceted task known as play. Instead, I marvel at the exquisitely well integrated postural awareness that allows the child to visually attend to the sound of the telephone as it rolls behind him, the perfectly graded muscle contractions that maintain the ideal degree of tension on the string, and the emerging capacity to hypothesize that this abstract object is a representation of an object that holds significant meaning and purpose for the adults in his life. Even the feat of identifying the individual properties of the object’s parts (string, wheels, size, weight) and combining them to determine a potential “use” for this toy seems nothing short of amazing.

This Alison Gopnik piece from Slate is several years old, but asks and answers thoughtful questions about purpose of fantasy play in learning: 

Why are children and fantasy linked at all? Why does the marvelous, the wonderful, the fantastic seem to be the natural territory of childhood? And why do children spontaneously choose the unreal over the real?

Some explanations that might once have seemed plausible, and that are still current in the popular imagination, turn out to be just wrong scientifically. There is no evidence that fantasy is therapeutic or that children use fantastic literature to “work out their problems” or as “an escape.” Children’s lives can be tough, certainly, but relatively speaking they are considerably less tough, more protected, more interesting, even, than adult lives. Happy, healthy children are, if anything, more likely to be immersed in a world of fantastic daydreams, public or private, than unhappy or troubled children.

Earlier psychologists, from Freud to Piaget, also suggested that children might be unable to discriminate between reality and fantasy, truth and imagination. It’s not so much that children embraced fantasy as that they were unable to recognize reality. But 20 years of empirical research have shown that this also is simply not true. Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.

In fact, cognitive science suggests that children may love fantasy not because they can’t appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult, but for precisely the opposite reason. Children may have such an affinity for the imaginary just because they are so single-mindedly devoted to finding the truth, and because their lives are protected in order to allow them to do so.

She goes on to describe that the purpose of symbolic fantasy play is really akin to scientific research, where the child posits a theory and allows it to (literally) play out, with the strictest adherence to detail, rules, and logic:

Suppose we combine the idea that children are devoted intuitive scientists and the idea that play allows children to learn freely without the practical constraints of adulthood. We can start to see why there should be such a strong link between childhood and fantasy. It’s not that children turn to the imaginary instead of the real—it’s that a human being who learns about the real world is also simultaneously learning about all the possible worlds that stem from that world. And for human children those possibilities are unconstrained by the practical exigencies of adult survival.

The link between the scientific and the fantastic also explains why children’s fantasy demands the strictest logic, consistency, and attention to detail. A fantasy without that logic is just a mess. The effectiveness of the great children’s books comes from the combination of wildly imaginative premises and strictly consistent and logical conclusions from those premises. It is no wonder that the greatest children’s fantasists—Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien—had day jobs in the driest reaches of logic and philology.

Still, we might ask, why do children explore the far and fantastic possible words instead of the close-by sensible ones? The difference between adults and children is that for most adults, most of the time, imagination is constrained by probability and practicality. When we adults use our everyday theories to create possible worlds, we restrict ourselves to the worlds that are likely and the worlds that are useful. When we adults create a possible world, we are usually considering whether we should move in there and figuring out how we can drag all our furniture with us.

Incidentally, I would argue that fantasy and symbolic play can be therapeutic, for precisely the same reasons that she describes. In this article, Gopnik is, of course, referring to typically developing children, whose sensory systems are perfectly calibrated to learn about the world with very little intervention, but the “troubled children,” whose developmental capacities for processing everyday experiences are out-of-sync, often do not spontaneously engage in this kind of symbolic fantasy play because their experience of the world is not well tethered to the “reality” of physics and logic. They are, instead, preoccupied by the need to feel power and mastery over their experience by endlessly testing theories about sameness and predictability, and unfortunately, like many scientists before them, they are often overwhelmed by the challenge of replicating their findings.

Children begin to learn about the world from all potential perspectives by representing first their own emotions and experiences in play, from the first time they step into their mother’s shoes, grab her keys, cell phone, and purse and walk towards the door. (What could be more salient than “bye-bye?”) As they develop, their ideas for play become increasingly more sophisticated and abstracted from their own immediate physical and emotional experience, as the child experiments with themes of danger and power or tries to understand the complex intentions of Anakin/Darth Vader. By providing children with processing challenges the scaffolding support (language, motor planning, organization and sequencing) to expand beyond their immediate experience through play, we can help them to expand their theories, construct better experiments and imagine a broader range of potential outcomes. 

Read it here. 

From Slate Magazine:

One of my personal heroes, Alison Gopnik advocates for exploratory play over explicit instruction in the preschool classroom, describing two studies that compare children’s behavioral responses to novel cause/effect toys: when given explicit instruction about how to play with the toy, the children were distinctly less likely to explore the other potential features of the toy, where the children who were introduced to the toy through affect-rich shared attention and mutual engagement (i.e. modeling) in an exploratory process were more likely to discover the hidden features of a toy, a more efficient process of activating the toy, and played with the toy longer. 

She comes to the following conclusion:

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It’s this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.

 (…)

(L)earning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn’t go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: “She’s a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me.” These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

Gopnik’s work is brilliant because she does not take for granted the perspective of the young children she studies and their relationship to the world in which they develop. Certainly, these studies demonstrate that exploratory play fosters attention and creativity in problem solving, but she argues that the reason why open-ended play and exploration should be included in the classroom is actually more fundamental. Our actions and attitude, as much as our words, guide a child’s view of the world and of themselves; by allowing them to explore and make mistakes as they grapple with a challenge, we implicitly bestow on them our confidence, encourage their ingenuity, and help them develop a strong sense of self-efficacy and agency in the world, positioning them to be life-long learners and innovators. 

Read the article here. 

This is another great series from PBS Parents:

Despite a parent’s best efforts to shelter them, children are exposed to frightening concepts and events through incidental television, radio, or newspaper images. Even if they do not have direct contact with these media, children are quick to pick up on the emotional tenor of the adult world. With limited capacity to think objectively and reflect on their emotional experience through verbal conversation, children explore and process their experiences and ideas through play. 

Parents are often uncomfortable when their children begin to explore scary events and violent themes. This series is about establishing shared attention and engagement around difficult subjects, reassuring them while also being responsive to their need to explore these emotional themes in the safe and secure world of play and art.

“Young children play about anything they hear in the news that interests, puzzles or worries them,” says teacher Jane Katch, M.S.T., author of Under Deadman’s Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children’s Violent Play. “If they hear about a bombing, they may make imaginary bombs and drop them on bad guys. If they hear about a school shooting, they may take turns pretending to be shooters and victims. If they hear about adoption, they may want to see what it feels like to be adopted. If they hear about endangered animals, they play games about hunters and their prey. Children play about issues that concern them in order feel safe and in control. It’s similar to the way adults use conversations with colleagues and friends to help them understand events and put them in perspective.” 

While many parents and teachers find it fascinating when children act out their reactions to events, they worry when the play becomes filled with violent images and actions. After 9/11 parents wondered if they should let their children play-act the Twin Towers falling down. After Hurricane Katrina, some parents worried when their children pretended to be hurricane victims in puddles at the playground. And there are ongoing concerns when children play with pretend guns, knives, and swords. A big fear is that if children’s play is violent then kids will learn lessons about becoming violent. Many parents wonder if they should stop kids from play-acting in this way.

“There is no simple answer,” says Diane Levin, Ph.D., co-author of The War Play Dilemma. “Like it or not, children are exposed to violent images on the news and they bring these images into their play. And in these violent times, this means the play often turns into war play. Parents’ and teachers’ attempts to limit this play are frequently met with difficulty. Teachers who ban it talk about an underworld that develops anyway, just out of the teacher’s reach. Therefore it’s very important when this happens to watch the play, discuss its content, and make sure everyone is safe.”

Be sure to click through each link at the bottom of the page for excellent guidelines, such as:

Start by watching the play unfold without interrupting. By silently paying attention, you can find out more about what your child knows, is struggling to understand, or may be worried about.

Gently intervene if a child gets scared. It’s important to keep the play feeling safe. If it gets scary or out of control, pause the play, and initiate a discussion about what feels scary. Ask kids to describe the rules of the game and come up with some revisions to make everyone feel safe. “A good question to ask is, ‘How can we play this game so it will still be fun, but Suzy won’t be too scared?’ Allow the children to problem-solve on their own. In my class kids made up rules like ‘you can only kill bad guys but not good guys’ to help others feel comfortable,” says teacher Jane Katch, M.S.T., author of Under Deadman’s Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children’s Violent Play.

Extend the play if it becomes repetitive. At times children may imitate acts they’ve seen in the media over and over again. If this goes on for long periods without evolving, you may want to introduce new objects and characters to turn the play into a positive and new direction. “Offer simple objects, like toy cars, airplanes, dolls, or plastic figures that relate to an event that has occurred — so kids can act out some of the things they might need to express,” recommends Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Ed. D, co-author of The War Play Dilemma. “If the play gets stuck, you might ask how people can help each other, or provide toys such as rescue vehicles and medical equipment.”

If you join the play, don’t take over. Try to follow your child’s lead as she acts out her story, rather than telling her what to do. Remember that play is reassuring and satisfying in itself. “In my class, after Hurricane Katrina was on the news, children were swinging on monkey bars pretending the water was rising below them. They were reassuring themselves, imagining they could climb to safety, and didn’t need any intervention from me,” notes Jane Katch.

Talk together. When the play is done, you might talk with children about what they acted out, if this seems appropriate. Discuss the news stories and issues addressed in the children’s play and answer kids’ questions simply. This discussion is an opportunity to clear up confusions, revise the rules and talk through conflicts that may have come up.

Read the whole series here. 

From his blog, Frontal Cortex at Wired, Jonah Lehrer responds to news of a New York City mother attempting to sue her child’s preschool on the grounds that the school failed to prepare her daughter for the ERB exam required of applicants to exclusive private elementary schools:

“Indeed, the school proved not to be a school at all but just one big playroom.“

He presents several studies that suggest that there is good reason for the school room to be a play room, like this one: 

A 2007 study published in Science, for instance, compared the cognitive development of 4- and 5-year-olds enrolled in a preschool that emphasized unstructured play – they were using Vygotsky’s “Tools of the Mind” approach – with those in a more typical preschool. After two years, the students in the play-based school scored better on cognitive flexibility, self-control, and working memory, all of which have been consistently linked to academic and real-world achievement. According to the researchers, the advantage of play is that it’s often deeply serious – the best way to get kids to focus, to exercise those attentional circuits, is to let them have fun.

And this: 

Or consider a 2006 paper (also from Science) that compared the long-term academic outcomes of low-income children in Milwaukee who were sent to a variety of preschools. Those who did best attended Montessori schools, an educational system that emphasizes multi-age classrooms, student-chosen work in long time blocks, collaboration and the absence of grades and tests.

And this: 

And the virtues of play aren’t limited to early childhood. This 2011 paper (via Eric Barker) looked at the relationship between young adults with high levels of “playfulness” and their academic performance.

Read more here. 

From Science Daily:  

This study is a feel-good no-brainer: A family that plays together stays together. In this case, researchers investigated the quality and nature of the relationship between grandparents and their adult grandchildren and found that mutual engagement in meaningful leisure activities provided benefits for both.

“Leisure is vital in the formation of bonds that last from generation to generation,” says lead author Shannon Hebblethwaite, a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Applied Human Sciences. “Shared leisure time allows grandchildren and their grandparents to establish common interests that, in turn, enable them to develop strong intergenerational relationships.”

Read the full article here. 

The full text journal article can be found here. 

Play is a favorite topic (and primary occupation) around the office, so here’s a collection of expert opinions and research that demonstrates the important role of play in the development of emotional regulation, impulse control, creativity and invention, physical problem solving, and organization and sequencing of ideas… just to name a few. 

• Scientific American’s The Serious Need for Play presents animal studies and human research which suggests that play is essential for the development of social skills, emotional regulation through stress reduction, and cognitive problem solving skills. (Sadly, this one is now hidden behind a pay wall. Ask me about this one.) 
• If you prefer to listen, Radiolab’s The Science of Play podcast presents a similar collection of research from animal studies, neuroscience, and psychology about the evolutionary function of play behavior. 
• The New York Times Magazine also looks at the evolutionary and developmental purpose of play in Taking Play Seriously. Of note is the attention to brain regions associated with play. For example, the “drive” to play comes from the thalamus, which is a relay point for incoming sensation to be routed to the cortex. Play behaviors are most apparent when the cerebellum is developing. Among other important functions, this area of the brain is responsible for the calibration of rhythm, force, timing, and other variations required for coordinated, precise movement. 
• Most of these articles reference the work of Stuart Brown, who heads up the National Institute for Play. If you’d prefer to watch, his TED Talks lecture can be found here. 
• NPR’s All Things Considered presents Old Fashioned Play Build Serious Skills, in which they discuss different kinds of play and the important role of play in developing emotional self regulation. 
• This one has already been posted, but deserves to be included in this group. Public Radio International interviews Stuart Brown in The Science of P-L-A-Y.