Children's Play Development

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Hi All,

I hope to rewrite a paper on children's play development that I wrote several years ago. In my last paper, I related different play types (such as solitary play, group play, and etc.) to one's later development (cognitive, social, and emotional). Through play behavior, children develop competent bonding and friendhship with peers. Could anyone here please give me more ideas on this idea? Can I approach this issue from another perspective? Thanks in advance for your input.

-- Shirley (laosx@yahoo.com), June 24, 2003

Answers

There is some interesting writing on play and religion. The historian J. Huizinga wrote on book entitled Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). There is a nice discussion of this business of being playful beings in Paul Pruyser's A Dynamic Psychology of Religion (Harper & Row, 1968), and he carries it further in The Play of the Imagination: Toward a Psychoanalysis of Culture (International Universities Press, 1983), where play is seen as a characteristic of the illusory world (following Winnicott's notion of illussory spaace). Pruyer's treatment of the illusionistic world (as opposed to the autistic and realistic worlds) is masterful. Pruyer would say that through play children learn something about the nature of realities.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), June 24, 2003.

Hendrika,

Thank you for your suggestion.

-- Shirley (laosx@yahoo.com), June 25, 2003.


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