Amanda Brown: Inventing the Impossible to Interpret the Everyday: How the Social Context of Children’s Early Pretend Play Impacts Development
Successful early childhood interventions have utilized pretend play to improve children’s executive functions, a broad category of self-regulatory skills that allow children to pay attention, plan and organize for the future, remember information and inhibit impulsive responses (Blair & Raver, 2014; Carlson & White, 2013; Lillard, 2013; Mendelsohn et al., 2018; White & Carlson, 2016). These promising findings motivate a serious consideration of pretend play as a vehicle for early childhood interventions that target critical skill development, particularly for those at risk of beginning their academic careers at a disadvantage. However, despite the overwhelming body of literature promoting pretend play in preschool, fairly little is known about how engaging in pretend play benefits children’s development, particularly in diverse environments (Gaskins, Haight, & Lancy, 2006; Lillard et al., 2012). Pretend play research has been dominated by homogeneous samples of children from advantaged backgrounds, whose parents are more likely to spend time playing with their children at home, particularly in the preschool years (Garvey, 1990; Gaskins, 2013; Haight & Miller, 1993; Lillard, 2015; Mcloyd, 1980). Although much experimental evidence concludes that pretend play causes children to exhibit greater skill with language, self-control and social understanding (Dore & Lillard, 2015; Gilpin, Brown, & Pierucci, 2015; Pierucci, O’Brien, McInnis, Gilpin, & Barber, 2014; Seja & Russ, 1999; White et al., 2017; White & Carlson, 2016), parent engagement with pretend play in the home has rarely been considered when evaluating how children develop these critical skills early in life. This research will investigate parent-child interactions during pretend play in a demographically diverse sample of families followed longitudinally in order to understand how the social context of children’s play impacts the frequency, form and function of pretend play in a child’s early development.
