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Pretend play has recently been of great interest to researchers studying children’s understanding of the mind. One reason for this interest is that pretense seems to require many of the same skills as mental state understanding, and these skills seem to emerge precociously in pretense. Pretend play might be a zone of proximal development, an activity in which children operate at a cognitive level higher than they operate at in nonpretense situations. Alternatively, pretend play might be fool’s gold, in that it might appear to be more sophisticated than it really is. This paper first discusses what pretend play is. It then investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to 3 skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind: the ability to represent one object as two things at once, the ability to see one object as representing another, and the ability to represent mental representations.

In 2000–2002 an innovative early years curriculum, the Enriched Curriculum (EC), was introduced into 120 volunteer schools across Northern Ireland, replacing a traditional curriculum similar to others across the UK at that time. It was intended by the designers to be developmentally appropriate and play-based with the primary goal of preventing the experience of persistent early failure in children. The EC was not intended to be a literacy and numeracy intervention, yet it did considerably alter pedagogy in these domains, particularly the age at which formal reading and mathematics instruction began. As part of a multi-method evaluation running from 2000–2008, the research team followed the primary school careers of the first two successive cohorts of EC children, comparing them with year-ahead controls attending the same 24 schools. Compared to the year-ahead control group, the findings show that the EC children’s reading and mathematics scores fell behind in the first two years but the majority of EC children caught up by the end of their fourth year. Thereafter, the performance of the first EC cohort fell away slightly, while that of the second continued to match that of controls. Overall, the play-based curriculum had no statistically significant positive effects on reading and mathematics in the medium term. At best, the EC children’s scores matched those of controls.

Over the past half century, in the United States and other developed nations, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in children, adolescents, and young adults. This article documents these historical changes and contends that the decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people. Play functions as the major means by which children (1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) make friends and learn to get along with others as equals; and (5) experience joy. Through all of these effects, play promotes mental health. Key words: anxiety; decline of play; depression; feelings of helplessness; free play; narcissism; psychopathology in children; suicide

An article by Angeline S. Lillard and others in the January 2013 issue of Psychologi- cal Bulletin comprehensively reviewed and criticized the existing body of research on pretend play and children’s development. Nicolopoulou and Ilgaz respond specifically to the article’s critical review of research on play and narrative devel- opment, focusing especially on its assessment of research—mostly conducted during the 1970s and 1980s—on play-based narrative interventions. The authors consider that assessment overly negative and dismissive. On the contrary, they find this research strong and valuable, offering some solid evidence of beneficial effects of pretend play for narrative development. They argue that the account of this research by Lillard and her colleagues was incomplete and misleading; that their treatment of relevant studies failed to situate them in the context of a devel- oping research program; and that a number of their criticisms were misplaced, overstated, conceptually problematic, or all of the above. They conclude that this research—while not without flaws, gaps, limitations, unanswered questions, and room for improvement—offers more useful resources and guidance for future research than Lillard and her colleagues acknowledged. Key words: narrative skills; pretend play and child development; research assessments.

Many studies have shown that making children laugh enhances certain cognitive capacities such as attention, motivation, perception and/or memory, which in turn enhance learning. However, no study thus far has investigated whether laughing has an effect on learning earlier in infancy. The goal of this study was to see whether using humour with young infants in a demonstration of a complex tool-use task can enhance their learning. Fifty-three 18-month-old infants participated in this study and were included either in a humorous or a control demonstration group. In both groups infants observed an adult using a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach toy. What differed between groups was that in the humorous demonstration group, instead of playing with the toy, the adult threw it on the floor immediately after retrieval. The results show that infants who laughed at the demonstration in the humorous demonstration group reproduced significantly more frequent target actions than infants who did not laugh and those in the control group. This effect is discussed with regard to individual differences in terms of temperament and social capacities as well as positive emotion and dopamine release.

An emerging public health priority is to enhance children’s opportunities for active play. Children spend a large proportion of weekdays in schools, making schools an influential and suitable setting to promote children’s active play. Rather than continually increasing the burdens placed upon busy teaching staff, the use of school playground interventions have emerged as a critical strategy within schools to facilitate and develop children’s active play via an informal curriculum. This scholarly article provides a research-based commentary on a range of school playground interventions to encourage both structured and unstructured active play opportunities. Additionally, future research directions for school playground research to encourage children’s active play will be discussed. Teachers, educational leaders, designers, researchers and play professionals can consider the findings from this article for future school playground intervention and planning to facilitate children’s active play within school playgrounds.

This theoretical paper discusses the role of pretend play and games with rules in fostering children’s self-regulation. It proposes several pathways through which play facilitates self-regulation processes. First, in play, children learn to inhibit their impulsive behaviour and follow rules which transform their behaviour from impulsive and spontaneous to mediated and voluntary. Second, play liberates children from situational constraints as children begin to act upon the meanings of objects as opposed to their immediate motivational valence. Third, children develop internal representations which guide their behaviour. Finally, play promotes verbal self-regulation as children are engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their partners in order to resolve differences in perspectives, to reach an agreement about roles, and to invent play rules. The paper further reviews empirical studies which explore the effect of play on inhibition, working memory, and private speech. The current status of play and implications for practice are discussed.

Play, as an educational concept, has entered many kindergartens in China; yet it has not become a core idea, or been prioritised in the teaching and learning process. An ongoing trans-provincial study started in 2008, using observation, interviews and document analyses. Based on findings from nine kindergartens in three provinces, this article illustrates how the concept of play is perceived and manifested in kindergartens located in three cities across China. It is suggested that there is a certain relationship between the rank and the status of play in a kindergarten, which may offer a systematic way to better understand how the concept of play is represented in Chinese kindergartens. Evidence also shows that the play concept has influenced Chinese educational ideas and pedagogy at certain levels but without changing the fundamental Chinese ideas of a play and learning relationship. Explanations for the phenomena observed, such as ranking versus forms of manifestation will be suggested.