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Tracy Gleason, Wellesley College

Visit any preschool classroom during free play and you will likely see a child pretending to be someone else. Make-believe play is a ubiquitous part of early childhood. And beyond being fun for kids, pretending and other kinds of imaginative play are also believed by some to be critical to healthy child development.

Research has found a relationship between pretend play and a child’s developing creativity, understanding of others and social competence with peers.

As a psychologist who studies imaginary play and childhood development and is no stranger to the preschool classroom, I have met many children for whom an imaginary friend or impersonation of a character is more than just an amusing pastime. Such activities often reflect what children have on their minds.

So how might imaginary play lead to benefits for kids? And does imaginary play make for more socially astute kids? Or is that that kids who more socially adept tend to engage in this kind of play more?

Learning to think from different perspectives

Imaginary play could encourage social development because children are simultaneously behaving as themselves and as someone else. This gives them a change to explore the world from different perspectives, and is a feat that requires thinking about two ways of being at once, something that children may have difficulty doing in other circumstances.

You can imagine how this could be a part of a child’s developing social abilities.

For instance, if a child is pretending to be a mother, he or she must imagine what it would feel like if the baby cries or doesn’t behave. If a child is pretending to be the family dog, he or she needs to figure out how to communicate with the “owner” without speaking.

The child who creates an imaginary friend has the opportunity to explore all the nuances of friendship – without having to manage the unpredictability of another person’s behavior or risking the friendship ending.

The child who impersonates a superhero can play out and achieve goals such as helping others and performing daring rescues. This kind of power is not easily found in early childhood. Getting to be the hero and taking care of others must be a nice change from being taken care of and ordered around.

Learning the delicate art of negotiation

When children play these make-believe games with other kids, they must constantly consider their own behaviors and signals to send clear messages about what they are doing. And they also have to pay attention to signals coming from other participants in the game and learn how to decipher them.

This kind of communication also happens in real-world interactions. But within the world of fantasy play, successful coordination requires extra attention to all of these details. Children must engage in sophisticated levels of communication, negotiation, compromise, cooperation and coordination to keep the play moving forward.

In fact some research suggests that children engaging in social pretend play spend almost as much time negotiating the terms and context of the play as they do enacting it. This might come in handy as they grow up and manage the rules of neighborhood games of Capture the Flag, the division of labor on group projects in high school and the benefits associated with a first job offer.

Are the benefits of play correlational or causative?

The studies that connect pretend play to all of those positive outcomes are correlational. In other words, a socially astute, competent child might be more interested in pretend play, rather than pretend play making a child more socially astute. Alternatively, some other variable, like parenting, might be responsible for connections between engagement in fantasy and getting along well with others.

In fact, Angeline Lillard, a prominent scholar in the field, looked at dozens of studies with her colleagues, and found little evidence to support the idea that pretend play causes positive developmental outcomes.

Instead, these authors assert, pretending might be one route to these outcomes. Or both pretend play and positive outcomes might be supported by other factors, such as the presence of supportive, encouraging adults, play that focuses on positive, pro-social themes, and the characteristics of the children themselves, such as their intelligence and sociability.

At the same time, the researchers are also quick to point out that children love to play and are motivated to do so. Adults who want to foster perspective-taking, empathy, negotiation skills and cooperation would do well to think about how lessons related to these skills could be embedded in the materials, themes and general content of children’s imaginative play.

Tracy Gleason, Professor of Psychology, Wellesley College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Anne Fishel, Harvard University

For all the parents feeling exhausted by the cooking, cleaning and planning of a million meals during the pandemic, there’s some good news. Commensality, or the sharing of food with others, is beneficial for your physical and mental health.

Most parents already know that family mealtimes are great for the bodies, the brains and the mental health of children. More than two decades of studies reveal that kids who eat with their families do better in school and have bigger vocabularies. They also have lower rates of depression, anxiety and eating disorders, as well as healthier diets and better cardiovascular health.

But what may come as unexpected news to beleaguered parents is that these same shared meals are also good for adults. Across the life span, from young parents eating with toddlers to parents talking about pandemic-coping strategies with their school-age kids and Medicare-eligible adults eating with younger generations, shared meals are associated with healthier eating and better mood.

Healthy for all adults, but especially for parents

For adults, both with and without children, there are numerous health benefits to eating with others. Even unrelated adults, like firefighters, have enhanced team performance when they cook and eat together as they await the call to action.

On the flip side, researchers have found that eating alone is associated with an increased likelihood of skipping meals and the downstream effects – lower intakes of nutrients, reduced energy and poorer nutritional health.

Regardless of parental status, adults who eat with others tend to eat more fruits and vegetables and less fast food than those who eat alone. Even when a home cook isn’t particularly focused on healthy cooking, home-cooked meals lower the odds that adults will be obese. Large portion sizes, the embrace of fried foods and a heavy hand with butter are more common at restaurants than in a civilian’s kitchen.

Adults who park their dinner plates in front of the television may have a greater chance of weight gain, just as evidence from the U.S., Sweden, Finland and Portugal supports the connection between obesity and kids’ eating dinner while watching TV.

In addition to these benefits of dining with others, there are additional boosts for adults who eat with their children – and they pertain equally to mothers and fathers. When kids are present at mealtime, parents may eat more healthily, perhaps to model good behavior and provide the best nourishment they can to their kids. When there is plenty of conversation with kids chiming in, the pace of eating slows down, allowing diners’ brains to register fullness and signal that it’s time to stop eating.

For kids, eating more family meals is associated with lower rates of obesity. The act of eating with others does not correlate with reduced weight gain in adults, though – unless their dining companions include children. Parents who dine with their kids also tend to report less dieting and binge-eating behavior. Parents may dial back some of these destructive behaviors when they know their kids are watching and ready to imitate.

Despite all the work, a boost for mental health

It may seem counterintuitive that a process that demands so much time and resources – the energy to plan the meal, shop for it, prepare it, serve it and clean up after – could also lead to boosts in mental health. Much more obvious is how kids would benefit from their parents’ demonstrating their love and care by providing nightly dinners.

But researchers have found that having frequent family meals is associated with better mental health for both mothers and fathers, despite mothers’ carrying more of the burden of meal prep. Compared with parents who rarely ate family meals, parents who regularly dined with their kids reported higher levels of family functioning, greater self-esteem and lower levels of depressive symptoms and stress.

And mental health benefits don’t depend on a slow-roasted pork shoulder or organic vegetables. Since it’s the atmosphere at the dinner table that contributes most significantly to emotional well-being, takeout or prepared food eaten at home will work nicely too.

In an earlier study of parents of infants and toddlers, couples who attached more meaning and importance to family meals were more satisfied with their marital relationship. It’s unclear in which direction the causality goes. Is it that those in more satisfying marriages gravitate toward creating daily rituals? Or that enacting daily rituals leads to more robust relationships? In either case, the establishment of meaningful rituals, like shared mealtime, during early stages of parenthood may add some predictability and routine at a time of life that can be very busy and fragmented.

Just as for children, family dinner is the most reliable time of the day for adults to slow down and talk to others. It’s a time to step away from video calls, emails and to-do lists, and instead connect face to face. Dinnertime often allows for a few laughs, a time to decompress and also to solve logistical problems and talk about the day’s events and what tomorrow holds.

Family meals are a COVID-19 habit to keep

For parents taking the long view, there is another perk to family dinner. When adolescents grow up having regular family dinners, they are much more likely to replicate that practice in their own homes when they become parents. Adults who reported having had six to seven family meals a week as a child went on to have frequent family meals with their own children. Family dinner and its benefits may be an heirloom you pass along to future generations.

Shared mealtime, however, is not equally accessible to all. Frequent family dinners are more common among white Americans, those with higher levels of education, married people and those with household incomes that are middle class or higher. While family meal frequency in the U.S. remained quite steady overall from 1999 to 2010, it decreased significantly (47% to 39%) for low-income families while increasing (57% to 61%) for high-income families. This gap can be understood in terms of structural disparities: Low-income parents often have less control over their work schedules and may need to juggle more than one job to make ends meet.

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As people now tiptoe back to living more expansively, many are reflecting on what they learned during the pandemic that might be worth holding on to. There is some evidence that more families ate more meals together during the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before. Some families who didn’t prioritize eating together pre-pandemic may emerge from the past year with a new appreciation of the joys of commensality. Of course, others may already be bookmarking all their favorite restaurants, eager to have chefs cook for them after feeling depleted by so much home labor.

But parents may want to remember that the science suggests shared mealtime is good for the mental and physical health of each member of the family. As people start to heal from this past year of loss, disruption and anxiety, why not continue to engage in nourishing practices that are helpful to all? In my family therapy practice, it will be a top recommendation.

Anne Fishel, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sandra Russ, Case Western Reserve University

Just about every institution these days is looking for creative individuals. Adults who can innovate in high-quality ways and contribute to the progress of science, engineering and the arts.

Creative expressions start from an early age. Children express creativity through “pretend play” – an activity that involves using imagination and make-believe. They make up stories and ideas “from scratch” and use props like blocks or sticks to represent different ideas and objects – for example, a block becomes a telephone or monster.

The question is, does playing in such a way help children become more creative? And importantly, can parents and educators use play to boost creativity?

Measuring creative play

In order to study the link between pretend play and creativity, first we need to be able to measure pretend play.

So, in 1990, my research program developed a measure of pretend play. This program uses a scale, the “Affect in Play Scale,” that measures imagination and “emotional expression” in pretend play stories.

Emotional expression is a term used to convey, for example, when a child pretends that a puppet is having fun while going down a pretend slide. Or when a child pretends that a doll is scared while running from a monster. Children express a wide range of emotions in that way – happiness, fear, sadness, anger, affection or even frustration.

The children we work with are mostly between six and 10 years of age. We videotape them – when they are playing individually with puppets and blocks – for five minutes. We then score their play for imagination, quality of the story and amount of emotion expressed in the narrative. When working with preschool children – between four and five years – we modify the program to provide more toys and more instructions.

Play and creativity

Our research shows that the amount and quality of imagination, story-telling skills and emotion expression that children show in pretend play is associated with creative thinking abilities.

Children who demonstrate better story-telling abilities in pretend play also show better “divergent thinking.” What this means is that when children are asked to think of different uses for many different objects, such as a button or a newspaper, they are able to come up with multiple uses for each.

Our research has shown that children who showed more imagination and emotion in their play are, in general, better divergent thinkers. Divergent thinking is associated with higher creative thinking abilities.

Not only that, when children show creativity in pretend play, it is highly likely they are creative in other ways as well. For example, when we went back to the same children four years later, we found those children had overall superior creative abilities.

Usually, none of these associations is linked with intelligence. Existing intelligence tests cannot measure the ability to engage in pretend play.

Running an intervention

So, then the next question is, can we increase pretend play skills that, in turn, increase performance on creativity and other important tasks in child development?

A small body of research has found that when adults played with children in a way that could help with the pretend play, even for a brief time, it increased children’s imagination and creativity.

Theoretically, engaging in pretend play involves practice with abilities important in creative production such as making up a story from scratch, generating many and different ideas, recombining ideas into new combinations, expressing and recombining memories with emotional content, and problem-solving in new ways.

Research on children with developmental disabilities has shown how interventions can help increase imagination. For example, in a study with children on the autism spectrum (problems relating, imagining and expressing emotion) and children with Prader-Willi Syndrome (developmentally delayed with a strong focus on food), the support of an adult play partner increased imagination in play.

What studies show

We observed similar results in my research with normally developing children as well. In 2003 and 2004, we carried out a pilot study with first- and second-grade children in a high-poverty neighborhood inner-city school.

Facilitated by an adult, children played with a variety of toys and made up stories with different content themes in five 20-30 minute sessions. They could make up a story about a boy going to the zoo, going to the moon, feeling sad because he lost his dog or feeling happy at a birthday party.

The adult played with the child and showed the child how to pretend. For example, the adult would say that the Lego could be a milk bottle, or that the red block could be a fire engine. The adult would suggest what could happen next in the story.

The adult modeled different expression of feelings, praised the children, encouraged different endings and prompted with questions.

Each child received the same story beginning and had the same interactions with the adult. But the intervention also had enough flexibility so adults could tailor their involvement to the individual child’s level of play skills.

We had a control group as well, where an adult was involved in helping children only with coloring and puzzles. There was no imaginative play in the control group.

Boost in creativity

After five weeks of the play and control sessions, the children were assessed again. Children in the play groups increased their play skills and also increased creativity and coping skills when compared to the control group. It was important to make sure that children had fun at the play sessions.

Two additional studies with this play intervention at a private girls’ school showed similar boost in creativity.

Children five to eight years of age were studied in groups of four. The prompts by adults were similar to the individual play session. The play facilitators were careful to stress turn-taking in developing the stories, so that one child would not dominate the play.

Children were tested before and after the intervention.

Children in the play group made up stories and played with toys. The control group played with crafts and puzzles. After six weeks, children in the play group were found to have better imagination. What is interesting is that creativity increased on a “divergent thinking” task for children who had lower than average imagination in play when pretested.

This study is important because it demonstrated that a small group of children (four per group) who met weekly for six weeks, in a school setting, became more imaginative. And even children who were initially low in imagination in play improved on a creativity measure, compared to a control group.

The implication for school settings is that creativity can be enhanced in the classroom with group play that can be easily carried out.

What parents/teachers can do

These studies hold promise as they demonstrate that a brief play intervention can help children increase imagination and creativity through play. This intervention is easy to carry out and could be used in school settings by teacher aides or volunteers.

A large-scale study is needed to refine the intervention and gather information about how and which children can best benefit.

In my view, from what we currently know, parents and teachers can help children improve their creativity by playing with the child, enjoying play, demonstrating pretend and starting a story.

So the next time you are set to spend time with young children, come up with the beginning of a story and then let the children do as much as they can. When they get stuck, or get repetitive, engage with them and suggest what can happen next. Most important – have fun.

Sandra Russ, Distinguished University Professor and Louis D. Beaumont University Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.