Understanding Play

All Things Play – Part 1

Play is a powerful thing. It has been studied extensively and has been shown to have various, crucial benefits for children and their development. It is so important, in fact, that one of the children’s rights is the right to play and there are entire organisations designed around ensuring that children get to fulfil this right.

However, it is still a criminally underappreciated aspect of children’s development and can be widely seen as a waste of time and unnecessary. But if we study children’s play, we can learn so much about them. Therefore, I am a firm advocate for the role of play in the young child’s life (even the adult’s life).

Before I unpack these benefits to play though, I would like us to establish a basic understanding of play by giving us an overview of the categories, types, and tools of play.

What is Play?

In the simplest way, play is any activity that children choose to engage in which may appear to have no real purpose or outcome, but which they enjoy. It may be self-directed or in collaboration with others, and it may have a goal or no goal at all.

Categories of play

When children play, there are five main ways that they play:

• Solitary play: This is where children choose to play alone

• Parallel play: This is where at least two children are playing, but not with each other, each is engaged in their own activity. Though they are together, they are not interacting with one another.

• Associative play: Similar to parallel play, children are engaged in their own activities and possibly sharing tools or interacting with one another

• Collaborative (social) play: This is where children play with other children

• Onlooker play: This is where a child is not playing themselves, but observing other children playing and choosing not to join them

• Unoccupied play: This can include something like staring out a window or movement just for the sake of it (which we often see in babies)

Unlike the types of play I outline below, a child will typically only fit into one of these five categories at a time. It may move in a stage form where children prefer certain forms of play over others based on their developmental stage. For example, young children who do not yet understand how to share may do more solitary or parallel play where they would not have to interact fairly with or consider other children and they can entirely direct their play.

However, I believe that children can move through these categories at any stage of childhood for whichever reason. A child may play alone at home, then parallel with a sibling, then collaboratively on the school playground.

Types of Play

There are various types of play, all with different benefits and structures. Play theorist, Bob Hughes, identified 16 types of play and their purposes to help us better understand play. I do not outline them all here, but they are definitely useful sources to explore. I have also included a few types of play which Hughes did not mention.

Often these types will overlap, and children will engage in multiple types in a single play session. Children's play will either be structured, semi-structured or unstructured. Types of play are often closely linked to imagination and creativity and the capacity to better do these things.

Among the types of play that children do are:

• Free (unstructured) play: This kind of play has no agenda. The child is not given any direction or rules to play within and chooses what they want to do. This could be just running about on a jungle gym, or making up their own game.

• Structured play: This is where the type of play has rules, so maybe it’s a board or card game, or a competitive game like Simon Says or Hide and Seek.

• Semi-structured play: Here, the child is told “we are playing with this, or playing this”, but they are not forced into rules of play. So, perhaps the child is given Legos and told to build something or they make up an entirely new game with its own rules. There is a direction, but their actions in the play are not dictated.

• Locomotor play: This type of play involves anything where children's entire bodies are physically active, whether just for the sake of it or as part of the rules of the game. This includes any kind of running about (like chasing, football, or racing), playing on monkey bars or balance beams.

• Imaginative (fantasy) play: Here, the rules of reality may not matter to the child. They might create imaginary friends and imaginary worlds with new realities. For example, playing the floor is lava, or pretending to fight a dragon. Imaginative play and fantasy play can also be separate types but since they co-occur so often, I have put them together here.

• Symbolic (pretend) play: This is where their imaginative play is grounded in reality, like going shopping or pretending to be in a classroom or drinking imaginary tea and eating imaginary cakes. A rock could represent a cake or block represents a gun.

• Practice play: When children pick up new skills, they will tend to incorporate them into their play. For example, a child learning how to clean their room might start using an imaginary broom sweep, pick up and organising toys.

• Constructive play: This play where creativity is involved, whether it's through building, drawing or writing. This play has something of an end goal or destination in mind. Whether that's a picture of a sunny day or building a huge tower.

• Exploratory play: This is where children manipulate their physical environment to discover something new. Perhaps jumping in a puddle to see where the water lands, or picking up an insect and feeding it a leaf to see how it eats.

• Socio-Dramatic Play: Here children act out the rules of their societies or cultures, like playing house or pretending to do shopping.

• Rough and tumble play: This kind of play is a physical form which may include playful wrestling or any other form of closer, consistent physical touch.

• Object play: Object play is where any kind of physical object is the focus on the play. Like playing with dolls or blocks. I would want to include video games in here too.

Other forms of play include creative play, mastery play, communication play, role play, dramatic play, deep play, recapitulative play, symbolic play. I have not unpacked these as they tend to fall into these larger categories I outlined above, but I encourage you to explore them too as they can provide more in-depth explanations.

While play generally comes naturally, there are children who do not know how to play in the way we typically understand. Neurodivergent children who struggle with social situations may not always know how to play in the typical way, but they may have their own form. Therefore, some children may gravitate towards certain kinds of play more than others. This could be indicative of issues they might have, or just personality and temperament.

Tools of play

There are also tools of play which have different functions. A tool of play is simply what a child uses to help them play. These tools help them to reach their goal in play. This could be a teddy bear, a board game, their toys, or stones that they found outside.

Remember when I said that play is useful for children to navigate the rules and conventions of the culture they find themselves in? Oftentimes these children will get tools that are versions of what they will need in their adult life. This is why toy shops will have toy cars, or kitchen sets.

Where they might not have these tools, it is always wonderful to see how they can make them out of nothing. A cushion can become ship at sea, a tin can could become a racing car. Sticks and rocks can become knives and forks and plates.

The Takeaway

Now we know that there are different ways to play, types of play within those ways, and tools which assist children in their play, we can begin to answer the question of the purpose and value of play.

There are many ways that children play, and it’s not nearly as unstructured as we might often think. I encourage you to pay attention to the play of the children in your life and see which categories their play might fall into, as well as what tools they use and the potential benefit this type of play might be having for them. You may be quite fascinated by what you learn. The next article will further unpack the value of play in children's lives

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