Recess!

I remember those days in elementary school when we would anxiously wait for the bell to ring to signal lunch and recess, and then beg for five more minutes when it was time to go back to class. Not only did we want to play, we needed to play games with our friends, either a structured game or making up our own rules. Looking back, I realize how important it was that we had those wonderful hours of nonsense fun. According to psychologists, playing as a child is extremely necessary for our social and creative development.

As a psych major with a focus on developmental psychology, I've been lucky enough to conduct some research on my own for my research methods lab this semester. Recently, my research team and I observed child's play in preschool children, and coded for the presence of three different types of play, all of which we talked about in class last week.

First, parallel play is defined as children playing near other children, but there is no interaction between them. Associative play is somewhat similar; the children play near one another and exchange toys and comments. Lastly, cooperative and sociodramatic play is when children play a game with a common goal, like box ball, a board game, or even make-believe games like house or tea-party. Ultimately, we observed that boys engaged in more cooperative play than girls, and girls engaged in more parallel play.

So what does this say about how boys and girls will develop socially? Not too much. We don't want to over-generalize these results; we all know there are tons of boys that like to play by themselves and a lot of girls that play make-believe games. Our study had some confounding variables and definite room for improvement, but one thing is important to think about. Perhaps we should consider how gender expectations affect children at this young age. Are we subconsciously giving girls messages to do quiet "girl" activities like drawing, and giving boys messages that they can be more rowdy and energetic than their female counterparts? How early are gender stereotypes reaching children, either through media or peer reinforcement? What needs to be changed? These are questions that as a psych student, I would definitely be interested in studying further.