Child's Imaginative Skills During Play example essay topic

child development By: gilly boy The Importance of Play in a Child's Development The majority of research done by Cognitive Psychologists dealing with human cognition has revealed it to be related to the human imagination. As evident by the fact that many psychologist view the process of thinking as the forming of mental representations and through the manipulation of these imaginative images we come to form thoughts. Thus, the imaginative skills a child learns during play are vital for that child's successful develop into a well adapted and functional adult. Through the simply act of play a child's ability to create mental icons is stimulated because a child's activity during play is mainly imaginary. In this imaginary world children learn to deal with reality and for this reason a child's play-time activities have a great bearing on their social, emotional, behavioral, and overall cognitive development.

Therefore, to coin a phrase used in a, "Families Today", column authored by T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., with Dr. Joshua Sparrow, "play is a child's work". Play, like all other human behaviors, appears to be vital for an individual's survival. The value of play to our growth as a species is illustrated by the actuality that it facilities a child's needed exploration of their environment. Furthermore, a child at play is not only developing basic motor skills but is also beginning to understand how the world relates to them personally because plays seems to further the nature psychological ability present in each person child of object permanence. This ability to imagine, "an object even though it is not presently sensed", as the text says, is the foundation of human cognition. In effect, the fantasies created by a child during play which the text summarized as, "a pleasurable activity engaged in for its own sake, with means emphasized rather than ends", which is, "not usually engaged in as a serious activity and is flexible in that it varies in form or context", stimulates and cultivates the entire process of thought in a human being.

The reality that a great deal of a person's thought is formulated during play makes it a subject worth studying. One such study was conducted by Mildred Parten. In her study Parten observe 42 children between the ages of 2 and 4 1/2 years old at play which lead her to identify five distinct ways in which children play. In the model, produced as a result of this experiment, children tend to become more social as they age. The child increases their social active by gradually begin to stop playing solitarily. Parten, believes that the move a child makes from playing alone to playing with other, called associative play, is done by a phenomenon, known as parallel play, in which children begin to parallel their behavior after one-another.

According to Parten, as children spent more and more time at play during the associative stage of play they slowly begin to structure their actions around rules and this is identified as cooperative play. Imagination remains prevalent throughout the various types of play because the amount of mental activity increases at each stage of a child's social development. Parten's final stage of cooperative play wouldn't be possible if the children didn't agree upon the parameters to governs their play which requires that they share the same idea or vision, an event the text referred to as, "social fantasy play". This constant sharing by a child of the same visions and ideas with other members of their peer group creates more complex social interactions and stronger emotional ties between children which may lead to friendship. Whatever the causes of friendship, play between a child and a member of their peer group benefits the child's social skills. As Bettelheim said, "a child begins to master social relations as", they, "learn to adjust themselves to other if group play is to continue".

A child learns what is needed to form meaningful relationships with others by playing with other children. The child learns that relationships between peers and indeed all people are based on compromise. As noted by Dr. Brazelton in his statement that, "in healthy peer relationships between toddlers, children learn the give and takes of equality". This is a fundamental aspect of the relationships a child must form throughout its life in order to grow into a well adjust adult. These various relationships formed during childhood give a child the opportunity to experience the emotional responses that accompany those relationships. Cognition is formed through experience and as such these early relationships allow a child to learn methods for dealing with their emotions through their further understanding of them.

The obvious social ramifications of a child's play-time are underlined by its behavioral benefits. For example, the development of a child's motor reflexes is directly related to play. As Bettelheim said a child", masters body control as he skips and jumps and run". Play is probably the best form of exercise available to a child. The primary behavioral benefit of play is the acquisition of knowledge through a child's tendency to observe other children and then model the behavior of those other children; therefore, a child can learn something from another child simply by watching the other child. Dr. Brazelton illustrates this skill in toddlers by stating that they have the, "ability to pick up and imitate whole sequences of a peer's behavior".

In this way children can imitate actions that were formulated in relation to an experience they themselves have never been force to deal with. The social, emotional, and behavioral aspects of a child's development are a function of their cognitive development. Cognition is a broad term which the text states refers to, "anything that goes on in the mind, including attention, perception, memory, language formation and development, reading and writing, thinking, problem solving, intelligence, creativity, imagination, expectation, intention, and belief". For each of these functions of intellect a case can be argued that a child during the act of play is improving on each of these aspects of intelligence. Both attention and perception are raised by the focus required to master games of skill. Language formation and development is a completely social process and as such benefits greatly from the social interactions provided through play-time.

Reading, writing, problem solving, and all the various functions of the intellect are sharpened through a person's social interactions. In this sense, a great deal of the linear transfer of human knowledge from one generation to the next is a social occurrence. Due to the large amount of effort a child go through in order to develop the very complex cognitive skills required for their survival it is evident that Dr. Brazelton's idea of play being the work of a child has some merit. Research indicates that play a method use universally, regardless of culture or soci-economic statues, by children to explore the limits of their body, their limits of sensory perception, and how to fully assimilate the information provided through these senses into the range of human interaction. As Dr. Brazelton said, "through play children learn about themselves and the world around". During play children create worlds of fantasy and in these imaginary worlds they learn to incorporate their day-to-day experiences into their psyche through actively attempting to understand and control those experiences.

According to Bettelheim, "through play, more then anything else, the child achieves mastery of the external world". A child's imaginative skills during play are totally devoted to an attempt at manipulate the environment around them. This trait has proven to be vital to humanity's survival and consequent evolution. A Child's exploration of their environment during the act of play is a function of the mental simulation or scheme they construct about the world around them during play. This mental picture created by the child is illustrated by the toys used by the child. The research provided by ethologists seems to indicate that all advanced animals use toys as a method of developing an understanding of their environment.

The text uses an example, of chimpanzees needing to play with sticks before they fully understood how to use them, to illustrate that animals seem to play with objects in order to gain an understanding of there properties. A human infant's display of aw and wonderment at a new toy can readily be observed. Furthermore, the child's fascination and amazement generally leads to curiosity which causes the child to eventually play with the object. In-turn, the child then begins attempting to understand the new object and how it can be used by him or her as a means of interacting with the external world. This idea of how we come to gains knowledge as children extents throughout our life. All knowledge appears to be learned by first playing with something, whether that something is a theory, or a concept, or a physical object.

Once a person has digested the properties of the idea then that person can begin to manipulate that principle and make it their own.