House Of Play

An attempt to cover all aspects of children's make-believe. The authors examine how imaginative play begins and develops and provide examples and evidence on the young child's invocation of imaginary friends, the adolescent's daring games and the adult's private imagery and inner thought.

Why is play so important in child development? Are children in today’s society suffering from a lack of time for free play, with the emerging dominance of screen play? Can play therapy help to uncover, rescue and rehabilitate children living in abusive environments, or even in war-torn countries? Is play also important for adult development? Play is a learning experience and a crucial component to childhood development as it allows children to emulate the behaviours of those around them and to develop their social skills. In this engaging book, David Cohen examines how children play with objects, language, each other, and their parents to reveal how play enables children to learn how to move, think independently, speak and imagine. Cohen suggests that much of our formative experiences of play informs our future selves, and explores how play can help us to become better parents. This new edition of The Development of Play offers a fascinating review of the importance of play in all our lives. It includes the latest research on the impact of digital technology, brain development, cultural differences in play and toys, and also looks at why parents sometimes choose different toys for girls and boys. The book also provides advice and guidance on how parents can play creatively and imaginatively with their children. It is essential reading for Early Years, health care and education professionals as well as undergraduate students in developmental psychology and education.

Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future. A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. The book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. Kaiser gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.