The Importance Of Play On Child Development

A major question that is continuously being researched and observed is whether children’s play is beneficial to children’s development. While many scientists have proved that play is, in fact, helpful in the development of children, I want to research how the different types of play affect children’s development, specifically children that are transitioning from late infancy to toddlerhood. The four different types of play that I will focus on observing is exploratory and manipulative play, functional or relational play, social play routines and pretend play. Furthermore, I would observe the children’s agency during their play and the social structures that can prevent children from playing, thus, resulting in lack of development. Allison

Mathis identifies agency as “making one’s identity and perceptions visible and actively acknowledged by others to enhance and empower the personal, cultural, and social aspects of one’s life.” Mathis conducts a study in which she examines the responses of a 3.5-year-old child to picture books of different genres, in order to observe how literature nurtures the development of agency in a preschool child. Mathis discovered three categories that describe the types of books that affected this child’s agency: 1) Agency through discovering the familiar in stories, in other words stories that were similar to his interests, 2) Agency in the actual engagement of reading and becoming informed, in which the child gained information about language and its use as well as content information around

Creativity, resourcefulness, inventiveness and flexibility are important to all children” and although children have opportunities to play on the playground or during gym at school, they don’t have the necessary conditions “within which they can find and create their own play”. Playgrounds were originally created to keep children off the street and out of trouble, however, playgrounds don’t offer much for children to increase their development, or socialize with diverse children, since they often attend parks that are close to their homes. Hart believes that this is a major issue and thinks that we should provide more “adventure playgrounds” in which “playworkers” provided several different materials and loose parts to let the children use their imagination and create their own adventures. Furthermore, Hart includes the fact that playgrounds do not offer much to children with special needs, and although they have created ramps for children with wheelchairs, these playgrounds do not offer developmental play to other children with special