Examples of Play and Developmental Insights
Duplo Play Across Different Ages
The first example comes from some work that one of my PhD students Tom is doing at the moment. He’s observing how children of different ages play with Duplo. You give the exact same objects to children of different ages, and it amazing how they do completely different things with them. A 4-year-old might stick the bricks together into a rough car shape and fly it around the room, saying that they’ve made a spaceship. But a 3-year-old is more likely just to pick out the square blocks and assemble them into one a big vertical tower. A 12-month-old, with the exact same blocks, will happily sit and just bang them together.
Varied Play Behaviours Observed on Television
The next two examples come from when we were filming the Channel 4 show the Secret Life of 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds. For this, we were listening to a lot of child-on-child conversations.
There was a lot of talk about friendship, and often it came across to us listening as incredibly abrupt. A five-year-old might say to another five-year-old who they’d just met, out of the blue, ‘do you want to be my best friend?’. And then 20 minutes later, again completely unprovoked, say ‘you’re not my friend any more’. It was hurtful for the child listening, to be sure, but how does this count as play? I’ll get to that…
Playground Dynamics: A Study in Contrast
Another example from the same show is that one season we had a school with a playground with a slide in it. We had one week of filming with 4-year-olds, and then another week watching 6-year-olds in the same playground. Again, the way that they played in it was so different! For 4-year-olds, all they wanted to do was run up the steps and then slide down the slide, over and over again. With 6-year-olds, though, in the same playground, I don’t think that I once saw them slide down that slide. For them, all they wanted to do was run up it! What caused such an abrupt shift? Again, bear with me, I’m getting to it…!
Anecdotes from Personal Experience
And then the last example that I want to give, before I explain what I think links all these examples together, comes from my own life. One Sunday, about 10 years ago, when I was taking my sister’s three kids out for the day, before I had my own kids. We’d driven to a big countryside park for the day. But when we arrived my niece Leah, who must have been seven or so at the time, just announced out of the blue that she wanted to stay in the car the whole day, and that she wasn’t getting out. I didn’t really know what to do, so I decided just to play along – I pointed out where, on the other side of the car park, I was going to take her brother and sister, showed her how to lock up the car and come and find us if she wanted. We didn’t get far away before she’d changed her mind.
Unifying Themes in Play and Development
So what links together these different examples that I think are all types of children’s play? And how does this drive their brain development? OK – so one of the big mechanisms that we think drives brain development in children is a process known as Bayesian learning. In Bayesian learning, you make a prediction about what will happen if you do X, and then you do X, and then you test whether your prediction was right or not. The best learning happens when you’re wrong in your predictions – but only a little bit wrong, so that you can learn, recalibrate, and make a better prediction next time.
Learning Through Play: A Continuous Process
As we get older, and as our brain wiring develops, our brain gets more efficient at making predictions. A young baby’s brain is pretty terrible at making predictions, so the types of things that they learn from are super simple, and super repetitive. Like a child, banging two Duplo blocks together. Each time they do this their brain is predicting that there will be a sound following on from a motor movement – but because their brains are so young, and so unreliable, they can’t make even a simple prediction such as this very effectively; but by doing the same thing over and over, they gradually get better. (This is the same reason, by the way, as why young children like to watch the same TV shows over and over again, and why they like to eat the same food over and over).
By 3, their brains have got more efficient at predicting a noise based on a sound, and so they don’t learn so much from this anymore, and they stop doing it.
But stacking blocks together – working out how they need to position their hands to get two blocks to stick – is hard, even if they’re just making a simple vertical tower. So this is what they do, over and over again. By 4, they’ve got better at this so they start doing other things, like starting interactions with other people around their Duplo play, that will also allow them to make predictions that are sometimes but not always right, so they can learn.