Fantasy Play

Piaget

Fantasy play, also sometimes categorized as pretend play, sociodramatic play, make-believe, and symbolic play, is most often associated with early childhood. According to developmental researcher Greta Fein, it has the following characteristics: familiar activities, such as baking a cake, performed without the actual material and/or outside the corresponding context; the activities may not result in the logical outcome, for example, no real birthday cake results; inanimate objects can be treated as animate, for example, a doll is treated as a baby; objects and/or gestures are understood to stand for something other than themselves, for example, sand is treated as flour and sugar; and children impersonate others, for example, bakers, mothers, animals, and even machinery, such as airplanes and cars. Although it overlaps with other kinds of play, such as rule-based games and object play, fantasy play involves a distinct set of abilities and has been linked to particular outcomes involving language, literacy, improvisation, political life, empathy, and morality.

According to Jean Piaget, who called it symbolic play, fantasy begins at about 18 months and ends when the child is about 7 years old, at which point, having developed sufficient cognitive mastery of symbolic representation, the child turns his attention toward games with rules. When children play, in the Piagetian view, they are assimilating new information and striving to integrate [Page 224]it within their relatively narrow range of schémas for understanding the world. In fantasy play, children may assign meanings to persons, social settings, and snippets of overheard adult conversation as a means of making sense of them. Fantasy play thus reflects children's learning about symbolic representation, an important cognitive ability. Later research has questioned Piaget's ideas on this subject, especially his treatment of fantasy play as a primarily individualistic enterprise and his claim that fantasy play ends around age 7, but it has tended to accept his fundamental insight that fantasy play is not frivolous, nor is it separable from children's developing ability to make sense of empirical reality.

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