Parent‐Child Social Play in a Children's Museum*

Parent-Child Social Play in a Children's Museum* Key Words: children's museums, family educators, parent-child play, pretend play. Two studies examined pretend play in families visiting a children's museum. In Study One, families were observed visiting an exhibit inviting visitors to try on roles. Parent-child play was found to be brief, sporadic, and non-contingent. In Study Two, families were invited to visit four exhibits and parents were interviewed. Parents were found to prompt, support, and observe more than engage in pretend play. Implications for family educators and museum designers are discussed. Children's museums, on the rise since the 1970s (Judd & Kracht, 1997), seek to provide opportunities for both parents and children to engage in participatory activities together (Brown, 1987; Disinger, 1987: Donald. 1991; Judd & Kracht, 1997). One of the most widely used means of encouraging families to participate in exhibits in children's museums is through the recreation of either a novel or familiar environment such as a doctor's office, grocery store. rocket ship, or Indian village (Cohen, 1987; McNamee, 1987). These "contextual" exhibits, complete with props, costumes, and written explanations, invite visitors to try on roles suggested by the setting and to engage in social pretend play (Danilov, 1986; Fialkowski, 1991; Judd & Kracht, 1997). Research supports the underlying basis for encouraging play as a means of engaging in a topic. Piaget (1976), Erikson (1976), Vygotsky (1967), and others (Garvey, 1990; Howes, Unger, & Matheson, 1992; MacDonald, 1993) maintain that engaged play facilitates a child's impulse to recapitulate or re-invent experience; that is, in play, children construct increasingly sophisticated representations of the world (Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1993), such as those encouraged by the social, technological, and natural environments recreated in children's museums. Smilansky (Smilansky & Shefatya, 1990) argues that in pretend play children gain new understanding from their experiences, such as those offered by exhibits where children can "discern the main characteristics of roles, combine scattered experiences in new ways, concentrate on a given theme, [and] observe reality in relation to themselves" (p. 30). In social play. Bateson (1976) argues, children learn that humans continuously take on different roles which correspond to certain frames, such as the multiple roles suggested by contextual exhibits. Research also supports the particular advantages of parentchild pretend play. Parent-child play is thought to have a positive effect on children's exploration of social relationships (Carson, Burks, & Parke, 1993; Carson & Parke, 1996; Howes, Unger, & Matheson, 1992) and family play relationships (Fiese, 1990; O'Connell & Bretherton. 1984. Slade, 1987; Sutton-Smith, 1993; Van der Poel, de Bruyn, & Rost, 1991). Sutton-Smith (1993) and Singer (1995) support the idea that children benefit from participating on equal terms with adults in ways that exhibits, such as a grocery store or a doctor's office, are designed to invite. Benefits are thought to stem from engaged parent-child pretend play, described as nondidactic, warm, verbally responsive (Goncu & Tuermer, 1994; Haight & Miller, 1992, 1993; Levenstein & O'Hara, 1993-, Van der Kooij, 1989), and mutually interactive (Howes, Unger, & Matheson, 1992). Family educators, including those at the museum in this study (Shine & Acosta, 1999), anticipate that parent involvement in pretend play at the museum will enhance parent-child time at the museum, encourage children to reveal their thoughts about the world to parents (Acosta, 1997), allow children to be on an equal footing with parents (Eaton, 1989; Gallagher & Dockser, 1987; Regnier, 1987; Robinson & Quinn, 1984), and carry over into other settings, such as the home (Acosta, 1997). …