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This article examines the level of empowerment and autonomy children can create in their play experiences. It examines the play discourses that children build and maintain and considers the importance of play contexts in supporting children’s emotional and social development. These aspects of play are often unseen or misunderstood by the adult observer. The article emphasises the importance of adult‐free play, enabling children to experience a sense of power in their play and explore their awareness of personal and social relationships. It analyses the influence the adult can have on children’s play spaces, by bringing an ‘adult agenda’ to the play situation, and how this may ultimately disempower children. Dans le présent exposé, l’auteur examine comment les enfants acquièrent une indépendance et une autonomie par le jeu. Elle examine les discours qu’ils construisent et qu’ils mènent et analyse le rôle joué par les contextes ludiques dans leur développement affectif et social. Souvent, les adultes qui les observent ne remarquent pas ces aspects ou les comprennent mal. L’auteur souligne l’importance des jeux menés à l’écart des adultes, ce qui donne un sentiment de pouvoir aux enfants et les aident à prendre conscience de leurs relations personnelles et sociales. Elle analyse l’influence que peuvent avoir les adultes sur les aires de jeux et décrit comment, en imposant leurs priorités sur la situation de jeu, ils risquent de porter atteinte au sentiment d’indépendance des enfants. In dieser Arbeit wird das Maß an Empowerment und Autonomie untersucht, das Kinder in ihren Spielerfahrungen erleben und herstellen können. Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den Diskursen, die Kinder beim Spielen entwickeln und fortführen, und betrachtet die Bedeutung von Spielumfeldern für die emotionale und soziale Entwicklung von Kindern. Diese Aspekte des Spielens werden vom erwachsenen Beobachter oft übersehen oder missverstanden. Betont wird die Wichtigkeit des Spielens ohne Einfluss von Erwachsenen, wodurch Kinder ein Gefühl von Selbstbestimmung erleben und ihre Wahrnehmung persönlicher und sozialer Beziehungen ergründen können. In dieser Arbeit wird zudem analysiert, welchen Einfluss Erwachsene unter Umständen auf Spielumgebungen von Kindern haben, indem sie ‘Erwachsenen‐Interessen’ in die Spielsituation einbringen, und wie dies Kinder letztendlich entmächtigen kann. El presente trabajo de investigación examina el nivel de capacitación y autonomía que los niños crean en sus experiencias de juego. En él se examinan los discursos del juego que los niños crean y mantienen, y se analiza la importancia de los contextos de juego en el sostenimiento del desarrollo afectivo y social del niño. A menudo, estos aspectos del juego pasan desapercibidos o son malinterpretados por el observador adulto. El presente trabajo hace hincapié en la importancia del juego sin la presencia de adultos, que permita a los niños experimentar una sensación de dominio durante el juego y explorar su consciencia de las relaciones personales y sociales. El documento analiza asimismo la influencia que ejerce el adulto sobre los espacios de juego infantiles, al incorporar sus ‘planes adultos’ a una situación de juego, y cómo, en última instancia, esto puede ir en detrimento de la capacitación a los niños.

There is increasing concern about declining mental health amongst children in the UK and the USA. Evolutionary and anthropological theorists have begun to build a theory linking this situation to decreasing opportunities to engage in free play. This paper will explore typical contexts for children in these nations, concluding that a range of recently emerging environments have decreased opportunities for collaborative peer free play and ‘discovery’ activities for the current generation. We will draw the theoretical analysis from a broad area of research encompassing psychology, anthropology, education, sociology, marketing, and philosophy to offer a new blend of practical and theoretical perspectives that may shed further light upon this topic.

This study examines the evolutionary function of children’s pretence. The everyday, cultural environment that children engage with is of a highly complex structure. Human adaptation, thus, becomes, by analogy, an equally complex process that requires the development of life skills. Whilst in role play children engage in ‘mimesis’ and recreate the ecology of their world in order to gradually appropriate its structures. Role play enables them to create their group cultures, through which they communally explore and assign meaning to their worlds and themselves in it. The research took place in a Greek state school and employed participant and non-participant observation of the children’s role play sessions. The findings, grouped under four thematic categories, may reflect the players’ adaptation and evolutionary processes but also the expression of their deeply rooted, existential concerns at that particular stage of their development.

Early childhood educators are often aware of the general importance of play in children’s development; however, they are often less aware of how play can support both academic and social learning and what their own roles can be in children’s play. In this study, we examined the effect that professional development training about play would have on early childhood teachers’ beliefs about and practices in supporting play. Educators’ beliefs did not change after training: they generally believed that play was relevant to both social and cognitive skill development and that play had many benefits both before and after their training. After training, teachers were more engaged with children during play and these roles were related to children’s cognitive and social play categories. In a time of increasing academization of the early childhood years, these findings highlight the importance of providing professional development opportunities about play to early childhood professionals in order to remind and inform them of the important role that play can have in the early childhood curriculum.

The relation between early fantasy/pretense and children’s knowledge about mental life was examined in a study of 152 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls. Children were interviewed about their fantasy lives (e. g., imaginary companions, impersonation of imagined characters) and were given tasks assessing their level of pretend play and verbal intelligence. In a second session 1 week later, children were given a series of theory of mind tasks, including measures of appearance-reality, false belief, representational change, and perspective taking. The theory of mind tasks were significantly intercorrelated with the effects of verbal intelligence and age statistically controlled. Individual differences in fantasy/pretense were assessed by (1) identifying children who created imaginary characters, and (2) extracting factor scores from a combination of interview and behavioral measures. Each of these fantasy assessments was significantly related to the theory of mind performance of the 4-year-old children, independent of verbal intelligence.

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future and learn about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children’s play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary.

Counterfactual thinking refers to mental constructions of alternatives to past events. In this overview of the psychological basis of counterfactual thinking, we examine how such thoughts influence emotions and carry benefits for everyday behavior. Two psychological mechanisms, contrast effects and causal inferences, can explain many of the effects of counterfactual thinking reported by psychologists. We then consider how counterfactuals, when used within expository but also fictional narratives (for example, in alternative histories), might be persuasive and entertaining.