Child's Play (child + play)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Child's Play: Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2000
Laura P. Appell Warren
Child's Play: Myth, Mimesis and Make-Believe. L. R. Goldman. New York: Berg Publishers. 1998. 302 pp. [source]


Child's play: Reflections on the invisibility of children in the paleolithic record

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 6 2006
John J. Shea
Were there children in Early Paleolithic times? At first glance, this seems a stupid question. We are obviously descended from Paleolithic ancestors. Yet, in archeological models of Paleolithic stone tool variability and assemblage formation processes, children might as well be invisible. There have been some efforts to identify byproducts of children's activities in a few Late Paleolithic contexts, but their possible role in broader patterns of Paleolithic industrial variability remains largely unexplored.1 In this paper I argue that the reason we know so little about children's knapping behavior in prehistory is not that this behavior was genuinely absent, but rather that we have not looked hard enough or in the right way at the lithic record. This is a pity, because of all the behaviors we archeologists attempt to reconstruct in our research, child-rearing must certainly number among those with the most immediate and important evolutionary consequences. [source]


Play and emotional availability in young children with Down syndrome

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Issue 2 2008
Paola Venuti
This study investigates mother,child interaction and its associations with play in children with Down syndrome (DS). There is consensus that mother,child interaction during play represents an important determinant of typical children's play development. Concerning children with DS, few studies have investigated mother,child interaction in terms of the overall emotional quality of dyadic interaction and its effect on child play. A sample of 28 children with DS (M age = 3 years) took part in this study. In particular, we studied whether the presence of the mother in an interactional context affects the exploratory and symbolic play of children with DS and the interrelation between children's level of play and dyadic emotional availability. Children showed significantly more exploratory play during collaborative play with mothers than during solitary play. However, the maternal effect on child symbolic play was higher in children of highly sensitive mothers relative to children whose mothers showed lower sensitivity, the former displaying more symbolic play than the latter in collaborative play. Results offer some evidence that dyadic emotional availability and child play level are associated in children with DS, consistent with the hypothesis that dyadic interactions based on a healthy level of emotional involvement may lead to enhanced cognitive functioning. [source]


Fathers' play with their Down Syndrome children

JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY RESEARCH, Issue 6 2008
S. De Falco
Abstract Background In children with Down Syndrome (DS), as in other groups of special needs children, development depends crucially on the degree to which parents provide appropriate stimulation and effective support. The majority of recent studies investigating interactions between parents and children with DS have been conducted on mothers. Method Through observation of child solitary play, child collaborative play with their father, and father play with their child, the current study focused on paternal contributions to child play in association with the effective quality of father,child interactions. A total of 19 children (M chronological age = 35.32 months, SD = 10.35; M mental age = 19.58, SD = 5.43) with DS and their fathers participated in the study. Two 10-min sessions, of child solitary play and collaborative play with their father, were videorecorded. A coding system for exploratory and symbolic play was applied to both sessions, and the Emotional Availability (EA) Scales were independently applied to the collaborative play session as a measure of the effective quality of the father,child interaction. Results Children showed more symbolic play during collaborative sessions compared with solitary sessions. Bivariate correlations showed positive associations between father play and child exploratory and symbolic play. Cluster analysis identified dyads in low, medium and high EA groups, which differed in terms of each partner's play. Specifically, both fathers and children of high EA dyads were more likely to show more symbolic play and less exploratory play than those with low EA dyads. Conclusions Our findings enrich the theoretical perspective that dyadic interactions based on emotional involvement may lead to enhanced cognitive functioning in children with DS. [source]


The Internet at Play: Child Users of Public Internet Connections

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 4 2006
Christian Sandvig
This article reports an ethnographic study of a subsidized computer center for children in an inner-city library. Unsurprisingly, young children play with the Internet. Surprisingly, this creates conflict with the justifications given for such centers by adults and public policy, leading to an atmosphere of tension between differing understandings of the Internet's purpose: as a place for ritual and play vs. as a place for the transmission of information and for work (Carey, 1989). Theories of play based on Huizinga (1950) and Gadamer (1989) are used to explain Internet play. The study finds that the narrowly instrumental rationales of public policy about the digital divide are rehearsed and repeated in everyday conversation at the center, even to the extent that child's play is denaturalized and seen as a problem that must be corrected. [source]