Play at Various Ages

For the first 18 months of a child's life play is sensory motor activity. During this stage children explore the nature of objects around them and experiment with their own physical skills of manipulating, crawling, standing, walking, climbing, and running. In the second year of life, symbolic play emerges, and children begin to imitate their own earlier activity (pretending to eat or sleep) and then later to imitate the activity of others (mother or father). Also during these years parents often play various social games with their children (peek-a-boo, this little pig went to market, hide and seek). The evidence shows that parents who play more with their children have children who are more playful.

 

Beginning at about the age of two or three, children show increasing interest in playing with other children, although at first they prefer to play alongside them rather than with them. By about four years of age, children increasingly associate with each other, taking turns and sharing toys or roles. Their cooperation at first is mainly in simple exchanges of toys or in circle games, like ring-around-a-rosy and farmer in the dell, where the ritual helps them work together. They also often play at adult activities, such as tea parties and firefighting.

From six to ten years of age the majority of children's games revolve around a central person who is the It, as in hide and seek and dodge ball. In the earliest games the one who is It is given power by the game, for example by counting-out. By the age of ten he generally keeps his position only by skill (dodge ball), and by 15 years of age the It is usually the player left over (musical chairs).

 

After the age of six the pretend play of children becomes increasingly imaginative, with imaginary, or pretend, companions and a great diversity of fantasy among familiar playmates. By about ten years, children become capable of individual competition involving winning and losing, which they express through such contestable games as marbles, baseball, football, hopscotch, and jacks.

 

During adolescence, interest in games gives way to interest in sports, which are games embedded in a context of vicarious participation and communication. Sports also involve the more organized context of spectators, coaches, and referees. The addition of these other people heightens the interest and the duration of the game.

 

Adolescents also become interested in an increasingly diverse range of recreational activities. Thus the avenues in which individuals find their play become endless, and they include not only team sports but also individual sports (skiing, skating, skydiving, tennis), and hobbies, crafts, dancing, theater, the arts, conversation, and love making.

 

Adolescence and early adulthood are times for the expansion of such interests. But with adulthood, economic responsibilities usually limit the time that can be given to play events. Beginning in early adulthood, play becomes increasingly vicarious and sedentary. Of some note, however, are those game addicts who continue in adult years to spend many hours each week following their own particular play avocations, such as chess, horses, tennis, golf, football, or basketball. Such games often become professionalized as ways of making a living and, properly speaking, may no longer be play, as the players are required to follow them in order to support themselves.

 

The experience of being at play can happen anywhere, not just in games. Many adults are fortunate to be sufficiently in control of their vocations that they can gain a certain freedom of choice within them and often have the experience of play as a result. The play experience can occur whenever there is free choice, control over anxiety, mild and exciting uncertainty of outcome, self-awareness without self-consciousness, and immediate feedback. This can happen in conversation, at cocktail parties, while constructing something, or while gardening. Fortunate adults are able to create these play occasions for themselves.