The Bernard L. Pacella, MD Parent Child Center

Resources: Briefings Bulletins

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY AND ITS SYMBOLIC FUNCTIONING

Play is fun, not only for children, but for parents and children to share—a means by which children develop skills critical to their human development.

Through play children learn how to interact with other people, express their emotions, master conflicted feeling states, and cultivate a variety of developmental skills (sensory, motor, and cognitive).

Often overlooked, play is especially effective in helping children develop their capacities to symbolize (Ablon, 1996)—that is, to be able to represent one thing (such as an image or an idea) by another (Beebe, B. Lachman, F., Jaffe, J., 1997). These capacities to symbolize are critical to enable children to learn to cope with emotions and situations they are trying to master.

The joy of playing together

As Erma Brenner (2001) often reminded us, “Childhood is a time of wonder”—a time when imaginative play is a central activity. From the beginning, parent and infant can celebrate this time of wonder by having fun and taking delight in one another. Through play, the infant can learn to be with another person, create and share experiences; and feel pleasure and joy.

During play, a child’s behavior varies. Sometimes, he or she may want the adult to interact, and may even direct the actions of the adult; at other times, the child may want the adult to simply sit and watch, without the adult’s active participation.

The more a mother is attuned to her child, the more she can respond to her child’s needs appropriately—whether interacting in response to the child’s initiation, initiating play herself; or at other times, watching her child play, without intruding (Sherkow, 2002).

Play has meaning

Following the World Trade Center disaster, we saw many children build towers and repetitively knock them down, and, at times, crash airplanes into them. As with adults, children reacted to the trauma in their own personal way. Play allowed them to assimilate the event and master its potential traumatic effects.

Remember, however, that inferences about the meaning of play can only be tentative unless corroborated. Sometimes the symbolic meaning is transparent and at other times it is not. Crashing an airplane into a tower may represent concerns about the trauma, but it may also reflect concerns about a family trip; or symbolize fears about the body—that it may be hurt or damaged; or a combination of concerns.

By observing young children play over a period of time, one may recognize patterns, repetitions, and play disruptions. Repetitive themes and/or moments of disruptions in the play, in particular, provide clues to those emotional issues which children are trying to cope with and master.

These issues may be personal such as feeding, toileting, or mastery of separation; or environmental (i.e., events in the environment); or, as often is the case, a mixture of various issues (see Solnit, Cohen, and Neubauer, 1993).

Play, cognition, and the mother-baby dyad

The major cognitive achievement during the first two years of life is the gradual emergence of the ability to represent experience symbolically (Piaget, 1962).

This capacity to symbolize is not only the result of maturation but also a result of the evolving dyadic relationship between mother and child. One can think of mothers as the first “meaning-givers” for children, since mothers link words to emotional and other experiences (Bach, 1994).

Just as children’s cognitive capacities do not simply mature as their brains grow, their symbolic capacities do not simply develop as a by-product of either imitating their mothers or identifying with them—but rather as a result of the complex interaction between mother and child.

A mother’s capacity for symbolization supports the construction and development of her child’s fantasy life through which the child learns to imbue experiences with multiple meanings, rather than with one fixed meaning.

The development of this ability in children, to represent one thing by another, is fostered by play (a spoon representing an airplane, for example) and is the means by which children master the frustrations of daily life.

Research has shown that mothers who actively join their children in play enhance the duration level of pretend play. Play with the mother, particularly pretend play, provides a critical vehicle for the child's transition to symbolization (see Slade and Wolf, 1994).

Play at The Pacella Parent Child Center

At the Pacella Parent Child Center, we help parents recognize that play is both fun as well as critical for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of all children.

Susan Sherkow, Christopher Christian and Lissa Weinstein are leading research efforts to evaluate whether a relationship between a mother's capacity for symbolization and the child's developing capacity of his or her own symbolic functioning, as manifested in play, can be demonstrated empirically.

Specifically, this research will assess whether difficulties in mothers’ symbolization in particular areas correlate with alterations in the quality or duration of the child’s symbolic play in those same areas. For example, if a mother experiences difficulties with the feeding situation, will her child manifest problems when the theme of the play involves food or eating?

The Center hopes the results of this research will provide invaluable tools for better understanding of the interactions between mothers and children.

References and Further Reading

Ablon, S. (1996) The Therapeutic Action of Play. J American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 35:545-547

Bach, S. (1994) The Language of Perversion and the Language of Love. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Beebe, B. Lachman, F., Jaffe, J. (1997) Mother-infant interaction structures and pre-symbolic self and object representations. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 7:133-182.

Brenner, E. (2001). Play and Psychoanalysis. Presented at The New York Psychoanalytic Society, April 17.

Piaget, J., (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation. New York: Norton.

Sherkow, S. P. (2002) Reflections on the play state, play interruptions, and the capacity to play alone. Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis, In Press.

Slade, A. and Wolf, D. P. (1994) Children at Play: Clinical and Developmental Approaches to Meaning and Representation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Solnit, A. J., Cohen, D. J., and Neubauer, P. B. (1993), The Many Meanings of Play: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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