The description of Arne's play with the bottle of milk fits nicely with
Lorraine McCune (see also McCune-Nicolich, and Nicolich) work on early
symbolic play. According to her taxonomy Arne is engaging in the first
level of a stage she called (after Piaget) combinatorial symbolic games.
Here the child (in this case Arne) repeats the same pretend scheme with
or to several receivers of the action (feeding first his bear, then himself,
then another toy or person, etc.). This level will soon be followed by
the second in which the child puts together two or more pretend schemes
to produce a sequence that is understandable to others, e.g, child holds
phone to ear, child dials, child talks on phone; child feeds doll, child
puts doll in bed, child kisses doll. According to a strict Piagetian
interpretation this should not be seen until the child is over two -- past
the sensorimotor stage. However, research has found that children often
reach this stage about the time they are able to combine two words, or
a word with a simple phrase (Mommy + go bye bye). And we all know that
for many children this happens between 18 and 24 months rather than after
24 months.
With regard to play and rules and metarules, I would heartily recommend
the chapter by Holly Giffen in Inge Bretherton's _Symbolic Play_ (mentioned
with a reference earlier in the discussion). In this chapter she discusses
her observations of children engaged in social pretend play (she's an
ethnographer) and the rules she thought the children were abiding by. She
argues that by and large what children want to do when engaged in pretend
play with others is to maintain the state of play, and that therefore the
most important rule they must abide by is what she calls "the illusion
conservation rule." This means that successful players introduce new themes,
switch their own roles and/or the objects they are using in these roles
without ever having to explicity say "let's pretend," a pharse which in
and of itself breaks that state of play. It's a fascinating article, and
since reading it I've often had the opportunity to see how very right
she is. I might add that once you read this, and/or see it in action,
you will not find it surprising that kids who are good at social pretend
play display high levels of social competence generally in the pre-school
classroom -- perhaps this is related to Jay's ideas that children are learning
things from the rules they devise in play that they carry over to the
rest of life.
Margaret
Margaret S. Benson
Dept. of Psychology | Internet: enz who-is-at psuvm.psu.edu
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Penn State Univ., Altoona | FAX: (814) 949-5547
Altoona, PA 16601 | Phone: (814) 949-5269 (work)
| (814) 238-5277 (home)