An introduction to pretend play
Channel: British Library
Date: 2016-10-13

Iona Opie once compared children to kittens, noting that both had an ability to get ‘drunk on nothing’ and to ‘create drama out of the most ordinary things’. This extraordinary imagination and capacity for creation is at the heart of children’s play. Drawing on the everyday and the fantastical, children enact games ranging from families to zombie killers, often making no ‘realistic’ distinction between the two. In the world of pretend play, everything has the potential to be real.

Pretend play today is greatly influenced by the media. Despite the widely held belief that the media is destroying children’s play, our researchers suggest that the opposite is true: games consoles, pop music and TV seem actually to enrich play, adding phantasmagorical and topical themes to fantasy scenarios. Children frequently incorporate their favourite TV characters, pop songs, computer-game battles and dance moves into their make-believe worlds. And they rarely simply copy what they’ve memorised, but instead, they transform, recombine and subvert.

Introduction by Michael Rosen.

Explore more films along with articles and teaching resources on the British Library’s Playtimes website: http://www.bl.uk/playtimes