This one was a doozy, kids. I’ve spent over a week combing through research across psychology, general education, special education, and ABA, trying to answer this question: What is appropriate play and is it even important?
There is no simple answer to any of it, but then again I think part of me would have been a little disappointed if there had been. One rabbit hole led to another. Each answer only asked even more questions, like an information hydra. Eventually though, I was able to draw conclusions from what each of the heads were saying:
- There is no set definition of “appropriate” play.
- There are some benefits to some types of play depending on what your goals are.
- Some people, mainly behavior analysts, are so ableist that they’ve made themselves stupid.
- General education has figured out “appropriate” play.
- The Nora Project as the answer to all of it.
Let’s dig in.
Defining “appropriate play”
Extensive research has clearly mapped out how typically-developing kids play and the general order in which it develops for them. Based on this research, The National Association of the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) laid out 5 aspects: Child-led, intrinsic motivation, immersive, spontaneous, and enjoyable (Allee-Herndon, et al., 2019).
For those of us who speak ABA, play is: Based on the child’s choice, occurs for a duration equal to or longer than the child’s average time spent engaging in activities other than those related to basic survival, occurring without outside prompting or input from authority figures, and automatically reinforcing. Looking through the ABA-based interventions on increasing play in autistic children, nothing about what they were targeting, how they were teaching it, or the results they got would meet these qualifications. Thus, ABA has never successfully taught play. The interventions and responses were usually highly contrived, adult-prompted, and based on external reinforcers. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that these early studies showed that the trained responses rarely maintained or generalized once external reinforcers were faded.
So what are we working with here?
Research on development has really only provided norms for play. Typically-developing children usually begin with exploratory play, including manipulating objects and early cause-and-effect, such as pushing buttons, pulling, and reaching. Functional play usually follows a little later in early childhood and includes manipulating objects according to their function, such as pouring imaginary tea from a toy teapot or pushing cars along a track.
Note: “Functional” play has been used interchangeably to mean “appropriate” play, so just to clarify: Throughout this post, I will be referring to functional play solely to mean engaging with items according to their basic, intended function. Don’t assume any other meanings, especially any judgement about these activities’ value.
Symbolic play occurs in preschool, and involves the abstract forms of play: Object replacement, such as pretending a cardboard box is a spaceship, and sociodramatic play, such as assigning one person as a dinosaur and another as a time traveler and acting these roles out.
You’re welcome for that idea by the way.
According to all of the research exploring play in the context of autism, autistic kids tend to get “stuck” at the “earliest” stages of play. Some will stop at functional play, some will remain exploratory. That is, based on their outward behavior as observed by and compared to neurotypicals. So, other than comparisons to play observed across the bell curve of normative data, there is no definition of appropriate play.
Now, here’s a thought exercise for you: Much of imaginative play is taking place in a child’s, well, imagination. It’s a private event. We have no way of knowing what is going through their head when they are engaging in “inappropriate” or exploratory play once they are out of infancy. To us, they are just lining things up. To them, that might be a parade, or a railroad track… or just a damn cool line that we simply aren’t appreciating. Either way, we can’t measure it.
Also, I’ve been working with autistic kids for a long time and let me tell you, there are some cool lines out there. Seriously, you should pay more attention.
What are the benefits of play, if any at all?
This is the question that started it all. In all of my research on Lovaas, I was finding myself stuck. Our assessments and the goals we base them on are all with the aim of making autistic kids look normal. Thus, all they ever look at is what play looks like in most typically-developing kids and where the autistic person falls in comparison. Goals are then created to force the autistic kids to play in a way that is more “normal.”
Aside from the asinine stupidity of trying to look “normal,” I am still left with the question of what is “normal” play anyway? I had tons of Barbies when I was kid, and yes, sometimes they got dressed up and went out or whatever, but most of the time, their heads came off and they were zombies with floating ghost heads. Also, something-something Boos from the Mario Bros games. Pretty sure Mattel didn’t have that in mind when they created Barbie.
Would that have been allowed if I was autistic?
But we do know some things…
On the other hand, I understood that play does have benefits crucial for development, such as motor coordination, problem-solving, creativity, etc. I was stuck. Where was the line? What was developmentally necessary and what wasn’t?
There wasn’t as much division on this topic among the fields as I had expected. Psychology, pedagogy, education, all of them stressed the importance of child-led, unstructured play. Unstructured play allowed children to explore and engage in independent learning opportunities, as well as take much-needed brain breaks. Contrary to popular belief, it is important to give our brains a break, and that is especially true of young children.
It also brought up questions for how typical early intensive interventions are structured, but that’s a different topic for a different week’s worth of research.
Applied Behavior Analysis was the outlier (because of course it was). ABA’s view on typical play was that it looked different in autistic children when compared to their non-disabled peers. Thus, ensuring play looked more “normal” helped autistic children fit in, use communication and speech patterns that were familiar to the neurotypical population, and generally allowed them to be more accepted by their typically-developing peers.
What the fuck, guys, really?
Back to the books
Research was able to produce some solid arguments for symbolic play though, even across all of the fields (though ABA arrived late to that party). Sociodramatic play, an advanced form of symbolic play (Thorp et al. 1995), allows children to explore roles in society and cooperate with the other participants in that society. Thorp et al. specifically explored the effects of sociodramatic play on development, and cited its usefulness in socioemotional growth for typically-developing children. Socioemotional education has been cited in psychology and educational sciences for years as something crucial and yet grossly lacking in many modern classrooms in the US. Sociodramatic play as a tool for teaching socioemotional skills is very logical; after all, it is essentially role-play. Both autistics and practitioners (neurotypical and otherwise) have cited role-play as a helpful tool for navigating social situations.
Thorp et al. also noted symbolic play is helpful for developing language. They cited Permutter and Peligrini’s (1987) assumption that pretending indicates a learner has the skills necessary to fully engage with language, specifically the symbolic nature of it. Further research also found increases in receptive language abilities when autistic kids were taught sociodramatic play (Ungerer & Sigman, 1987).
People are overrated
Even when considering the value of all effective methods of communication, it’s fair to say that there are benefits to understanding what is being said to you. Receptive language skills also help build socioemotional skills which allow for better emotional regulation. Combine all of these and you end up removing challenges from social situations– a clear win. After all, there is currently no way to completely avoid social interaction (as much as some of us may try) and still be able to fully access all of the benefits of society.
Now, if you want to live off the land and go be a hermit in the woods, more power to you. Yes, I’m serious. You do you, if that’s what you want.
So, symbolic play can be beneficial for comprehension and unavoidable social interactions. The problem is, in order for symbolic play to occur, there needs to be some form of functional play present. After all, it stands to reason that in order to tact an object as something else or performing a different function, one would need to be able to tact the original item and its function to begin with (Lee et al., 2019). Lee et al. looked at object replacement as a form of symbolic play and gave the example of a bowl. In order to understand that the bowl is being transformed into a boat, the child would need to understand that 1. The object is a bowl, 2. Bowls are used for holding things, 3. Boats are used for holding things in water.
So there it is, right? Functional play is important because it leads to symbolic play, and symbolic play leads to skills that are objectively beneficial for all learners.
Well, not exactly.
About those prerequisites…
The prerequisite skills above are purely language skills. Being able to identify a bowl, expressively and receptively, and its function, either through demonstration, discrete measurement across domains (i.e. expressive and receptive identification), or by simply obtaining the bowl and using it when needed are all things that can occur without ever having played with such items. Thus, play is not necessary for obtaining these prerequisite skills.
Then there’s social play. I’m still on the fence with this one. Engaging with peers, as opposed to adults, provides opportunities to practice navigating social situations that are meaningful for the children involved. Interacting with adults doesn’t offer the same experiences or opportunities– the dynamic is totally different, no matter how good we are at not acting our age. Social interaction also improves mental health. Lack of social interaction due to social anxiety for example, has been linked to increased anxiety later in life as well as low self-esteem, and deficits in socioemotional skills, such as emotional regulation and coping skills (Coplan et al., 2010). However, some of these rely on motivation to actually interact with others in the first place. There is some research to show social interaction with peers can become motivating (I’ll get to that later), but I have yet to see research looking at the outcomes for people who truly have no interest in human interaction whatsoever.
To be fair, I imagine there are some barriers to studying this, the obvious being finding participants for such research in the first place.
The trail of breadcrumbs
Subjects do exist though. Consider the case of Christopher Knight. He disappeared into the woods in Maine and was living by stealing from surrounding houses. He remained in the woods for 27 years with no human contact before he was caught by police. Unfortunately, he was 19 when he disappeared, so there isn’t much we can glean from his story about the importance of social interaction before adulthood.
That information lies in the cases of feral children, but good luck finding any case reviews on those that provide truly objective information rather than simply pathologizing their behaviors. It can be hard to objectively study these cases though. The interpretation of the whole situation depends entirely on one’s own values. Plus when kids are involved, we all tend to get a little more fired up about it.
Feral children are children who were raised with little to no human interaction. Many are raised among animals in the wilderness. When feral children are discovered, they are usually captured as soon as possible and a slew of psychologists flock to the chance to teach them “civilized” human behaviors such as manners and vocal language. Depending on how old they were when they ceased to access human interaction and how old they were when they were found, most don’t gain social and communication skills to the levels considered typical for adults. They then usually spend their days either institutionalized or having escaped back to their previous life in some capacity.
What did we find?
So what can we objectively glean from cases of humans who have little to no human interaction during long periods of their development? They are unlikely to ever appear “fully normal” to their society, the changes to their behavior and environment are usually against their will and based on the reinforcing value of the ones in charge of them. Thus, social interaction’s value seems to be only as much as a person’s willingness to participate in a given society. That, and the ability to live a lifespan considered to be “normal” and “healthy,” which is also subjective to an extent.
OK, we have all of this information. Now what?
Well, chew on all this for a while, and then check out Part II.
Resources
Allee-Herndon, K.A., Killingsworth-Roberts, S., Hu, B., Clark, M.H., & Steward, M. (2020). Let’s Talk Play! Exploring the Possible Benefits of Play-Based Pedagogy on Language and Literacy Learning in Two Title I Kindergarten Classrooms. Early Childhood Education Journal, January https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-020-01141-6.
Allee-Herndon, K.A., Dillman, D., & Killingsworth-Roberts, S. (2019). Putting Play in its Place: Presenting a Continuum to Decrease Mental Health Referrals and Increase Purposeful Play in Classrooms. International Journal of Play, https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2019.1643993.
Allee-Herndon, K.A. & Killingsworth-Roberts, S. (2020). The Power of Purposeful Play in Primary Grades: Adjusting Pedagogy to Children’s Needs and Academic Gains. Journal of Education, 1-10, https://DOI.org/10.1177/0022057420903272
Alexander, M. (2018, Jan, 23). Creating Inclusive Play Spaces: Place to Start. Play Radical. https://playradical.com/2018/01/23/creating-inclusive-play-spaces-a-place-to-start/
Baker, M.J., Koegel, R. L., Koegel, L. K. (1998). Increasing the Social Behavior of Young Children with Autism Using their Obsessive Behaviors. Journal of the Association for the Severely Handicapped, Vol 23(4), 300-308.
Coplan, R.J., Schnieder, B.H., Matheson, A., & Graham, A. (2010). ‘Play Skills’ for Shy Children: Development and a Social Skills Facilitated Play Early Intervention Program for Extremely Inhibited Preschoolers. Infant and Child Development, 19, 223-227. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.668.
Ginsburg, K. R. (2007). The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds. American Academy of Pediatrics. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tc3I2GKvR9nIjbZJIqUdiESmW0PrVHwDOAg4ssPM6Ns/edit
Hatzenbuhler, E.G., Molteni, J.D., Axe, J.B. (2019). Increasing Play Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder via Peer-Mediated Matrix Training. Education and Treatment of Children, Vol. 24(3), 295-320.
Jung, S. & Sainato, D.M. (2013) Teaching Play Skills to Young Children with Autism. Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability, Vol. 38(1), 74-90.
Koegel, R.L., & Koegel, L.K. (2006). Pivotal response treatments for autism: Communication, social, & academic development. Paul H Brookes Publishing.
Lee, G.T., Feng, H., Xu, S., & Jin, S. (2019). Increasing “Object Substitution” Symbolic Play in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Behavior Modification, Vol. 43(1), 82-114. DOI: 10.1177/0145445517739276
Lowry, L. (2016). Play & Autism: More Evidence for Following the Child’s Lead. The Hanen Centre. https://www.hanen.org/MyHanen/Resource-Centre/Articles/Research/Play—Autism–More-evidence-for-following-the-chi.aspx
Stahmer, A.C. & Schriebman, L. (1992). Teaching Children with Autism Appropriate Play in Unsupervised Environments Using Self-Management Treatment Package. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Vol. 25(2), 447-459.
The Nora Project. https://thenoraproject.ngo/
Thorp, D.M., Stahmer, A.C., & Schriebman, L. (1995). Effects of Sociodramatic Play on Children with Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 25(3), 265-282.