Running on Empty? Observing Causal Relationships of Play and Development.

In an article in the January 2013 Psychological Review, Lillard, Lemer, Hopkins, Dore, Smith, and Palmquist set out to critique the customary claim that pretend play contributes to healthy child Following Peter Smith, they distinguished three possibilities for the impact of pretend play. Pretend play, they proposed, might serve a crucial causal role in healthy development, function as one of many equifinal routes to healthy development, or represent an epiphenomenon of other factors that promote healthy They reviewed a variety of correlational and experimental studies to choose among these three possibilities and, in the absence of consistently strong positive correlations, they cast doubt on the notion that pretend play serves a crucial, causal role. In this article, Harris and Jalloul review the arguments of the Lillard article to reassess this negative conclusion. The authors suggest that studies emphasizing the frequency of pretend play may not be able to tell us whether it serves a crucial role in healthy Key words: cross-cultural comparison; children with autism and pretend play; early-child development; pretend play; theory-of-mind tasks and pretend playRecently, cognitive psychologist Angeline Lillard (2013) andfive of her colleagues reviewed the psychological literature on pretend play and concluded that existing evidence does not support strong causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play for development. The authors called for fresh research and new thinking in several areas. We applaud their review for two reasons, one retrospective and the other prospective. The review serves the field by offering a comprehensive analysis of fairly scattered literature and by firmly noting the strengths and weaknesses of the literature. It also provides a stimulus to future work and an indication of how to conduct this work with greater rigor. Nevertheless, in thinking about how best to promote future research in psychology and education in the wake of the review, we raise questions about the conceptual framework that was used. To set the scene, however, it will be useful to discuss some basic findings on the development of pretend play.The Robust Emergence of Pretend PlayPretend play emerges during early childhood in quite different human cultures. For example, Callaghan et al. (2011) interviewed mothers of toddlers in urban Canada, rural India, and rural Peru. In each setting, 90 percent or more of mothers said that their child began to produce pretend actions involving social role play or props at around two to three years of age. Indeed, in the course of short four-to-six-minute observational sessions, most children in all three set- tings engaged in one or more acts of pretend play (e.g., feeding a doll with a toy fork) when presented with suitable toy props. Nevertheless, children in Canada more often play pretend than children in India and Peru-perhaps because of the social scaffolding they had previously received from care givers. All the Canadian mothers reported pretending with their children whereas considerably fewer Peruvian (42 percent) and Indian (24 percent) mothers did so.How exactly does pretend play, whether it is social role play or prop-based pretense, emerge in early childhood? Its emergence does not likely depend on explicit or deliberate instruction in the meaning of pretense for two reasons. First, it is far from clear how adults or older children teach toddlers to pretend if the toddlers lack any natural ability to make sense of this kind of play's unusual characteristics. For example, in pretend play, a mother can stipulate a temporary identity of an object so that it takes on new powers, at least within the pretend world she creates. When she stipulates that a shoebox is a bath, it makes a teddy bear wet when it is placed in the box (Harris 2000). Second, even in cultures where adult care givers do not encourage or support pretend play, it still emerges. …

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