Children's Play in Child Care Settings
Goelman, Hillel and Jacobs, Ellen (eds.) (1994).
Albany: State University of New York Press; 234 pages. $65.50 (hard); $21.95 (paper). ISBN 0791416984.
This book includes accounts of ten research studies by different authors of interrelationships between quality of family life, quality of day care and, within the day care, children's proficiencies in language, cognition, and play. The introduction by Jacobs begins with the statement that 'This book is about child care and play...the substantive focus of each of the papers is play' (p. 1). However, that is not really true. The substantive focus of the book is on the quality of day care and the various effects that it may have, including those on play, if any. For the greater part, once again, play is a dependent variable and we learn very little new about it except perhaps in those more practical papers where dramatic play centers and teacher intervention are used to evoke higher levels of child interaction and pretense (Howe et al., Curry and Arnaud). It is assumed throughout that the sociodramatic form of play is the most desirable, though no attempt is made to examine that widely held assumption. Given that little boys who become engineers are probably given to prodigious amounts of solitary block play and construction, the preference of these researchers for sociodramatic play, which girls usually also prefer, might perhaps evoke a query concerning the implicit 'sexism' of the esteem given to such sociodramatic play.
Being disappointed about not learning much about play, however, need not distract a reviewer from the otherwise excellent pursuit in this work of the impact of environmental variables on child daycare behavior. As one might suppose, some of the studies in differential ways support the expectation that better home care and discourse will be associated with higher levels of discourse and interaction by the child in the daycare situation, which in turn will be associated with later positive school outcomes (Field, Lamb et al., Roopnarine et al.). All of which is, in general, a victory once again for the haute bourgeois and the educated. It is cynical to notice how often our own kind of children are the winners in these research efforts by our own kind of researchers. Still, it is a caution against the cultural subjectivity of so much of this kind of research.
On the evidence at hand, language stimulation rather than play seems to be the tie that more often binds much of this together (Goelman and Pence). Still, the multiplicity of definitions of what constitutes quality daycare is probably what prevents there being anything like a safe generalization here. Quality daycare, for example, can refer to 'caregiver training, caregiver facilitation of child interaction, the kinds of play materials, the organization of play space, and the degree of familiarity with same aged peers...' (Goelman, p. 216).
There are also scattered findings of interest. One study, for example, reported that as time passed, teachers did less and less mediating of children's play, attending to their safety but seldom to their interaction (Howes and Clements). But, on the contrary, another study found positive interactions of teacher and child were correlated with positive interactions of child and child (Wittmer and Honig). Better attendance was associated with levels of classroom involvement (Jacobs and White). Children with special needs were not helped by being put in with non-handicapped children (Tobias). Interactive play was more interfered with by antecedent difficulties than was object play (Rosenthal), and so on.
What these and other researchers need to do is to face the fact that they seldom, if ever, study play as an independent variable. They 'believe' in play so totally (and who doesn't intuit the same?) that they want to show desperately what a good thing it is and they think they can do this by tying it to all the other good educational things we try to do with children. They want to show that play contributes to development but their notion of development is typically a narrow, school-oriented one, a product ultimately of the rationality of the enlightenment, as well as of Piaget and Vygotksy and Berlyne and the like. It is as if Freud and Erikson and his successors never existed; as if rough and tumble play never existed with the emphasis that they both (Freud and R & T) imply about matters affective and confictful. It is true that typically higher levels of play are correlated with higher levels of other competencies, but that doesn't really tell us very much. Healthy people seem to play more and sick people seem to play less, if at all. The former are more variable and complex and the latter are stereotyped and simplistic. But now that Peter Smith has disposed of most of the supposedly causal relationships in both the play and problem-solving and the play and creativity research as experimenter effects (Smith 1988), it behooves us to examine the probability that play's assistance to development and adjustment has more to do with the quality of the player's emotional life, and less to do with marketable cognitions, as Greta Fein (1989) and Brian Vandenberg (1988) of Rubin, Fein and Vandenberg (1983) now insist. In which case, this book should have been about the microscopic study of how the daycare play opportunities allow these children to model their world for themselves in ways that bring them such mastery and coherence that they engender a sense of being in a worthwhile place at a worthwhile time with a worthwhile future.
References
Smith, P. K. (1988). “Children's Play and Its Role in Early Development: A Reevaluation of the ‘Play Ethos’.' In A.D. Pellegrini (ed.) Psychological Bases of Early Education. New York: Wiley.
Fein, G.G. (1989). “Mind, Meaning and Affect: Proposals for a Theory of Pretense.” Developmental Review 9, p. 345-363.
Rubin K.H., G.G. Fein, and B. Vandenberg (1983). “Play.” In P.H. Mussen (ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 4. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Vandenberg, B. (1988). “The Realities of Play.” In Delmont, C. Morrison (ed.) Organizing Early Experience. Amityville, New York: Baywood, pp.198-208.
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