The Importance of Play in a Child’s Development

The Importance of Play in a Child’s Development

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The majority of research done by Cognitive Psychologists dealing with human cognition has revealed it to be related to the human imagination. As evident by the fact that many psychologist view the process of thinking as the forming of mental representations and through the manipulation of these imaginative images we come to form thoughts. Thus, the imaginative skills a child learns during play are vital for that child’s successful develop into a well adapted and functional adult. Through the simply act of play a child’s ability to create mental icons is stimulated because a child’s activity during play is mainly imaginary. In this imaginary world children learn to deal with reality and for this reason a child’s play-time activities have a great bearing on their social, emotional, behavioral, and overall cognitive development.

Therefore, to coin a phrase used in a, “Families Today,” column authored by T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., with Dr. Joshua Sparrow, “play is a child’s work.” Play, like all other human behaviors, appears to be vital for an individual’s survival. The value of play to our growth as a species is illustrated by the actuality that it facilities a child’s needed exploration of their environment. Furthermore, a child at play is not only developing basic motor skills but is also beginning to understand how the world relates to them personally because plays seems to further the nature psychological ability present in each person child of object permanence. This ability to imagine, “an object even though it is not presently sensed,” as the text says, is the foundation of human cognition. In effect, the fantasies created by a child during play which the text summarized as, “a pleasurable activity engaged in for its own sake, with means emphasized rather than ends,” which is, “not usually engaged in as a serious activity and is flexible in that it varies in form or context,” stimulates and cultivates the entire process of thought in a human being.

The reality that a great deal of a person’s thought is formulated during play makes it a subject worth studying. One such study was conducted by Mildred Parten. In her study Parten observe 42 children between the ages of 2 and 4½ years old at play which lead her to identify five distinct ways in which children ...

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...picture created by the child is illustrated by the toys used by the child. The research provided by ethologists seems to indicate that all advanced animals use toys as a method of developing an understanding of their environment. The text uses an example, of chimpanzees needing to play with sticks before they fully understood how to use them, to illustrate that animals seem to play with objects in order to gain an understanding of there properties. A human infant’s display of aw and wonderment at a new toy can readily be observed. Furthermore, the child’s fascination and amazement generally leads to curiosity which causes the child to eventually play with the object. In-turn, the child then begins attempting to understand the new object and how it can be used by him or her as a means of interacting with the external world. This idea of how we come to gains knowledge as children extents throughout our life.

All knowledge appears to be learned by first playing with something, whether that something is a theory, or a concept, or a physical object. Once a person has digested the properties of the idea then that person can begin to manipulate that principle and make it their own.