Play and Self-Regulation: Lessons from Vygotsky

The authors consider the analysis of the literature on play research by Lillard and others in the January 2013 Psychological Bulletin, an analysis that questioned the prevailing assumption of a causal relationship between play and child development, especially in the areas of creativity, reasoning, executive function, and regulation of emotions. The authors regard these connections as critical for teachers in early-childhood classrooms and for other advocates of child play. They claim that the conclusions of Lillard and her coauthors place these professionals in a difficult position because they already face sharp pressure to replace play with academic activities. The authors suggest that the difficulty researchers have in linking play to development partly results from a failure to account for both cognitive and non-cognitive developments across a complex trajectory. To help see the problem more clearly, they argue for a return to the Vygotskian and post-Vygotskian theories that differentiate between immature and mature play. The authors then describe their creation, an observational tool based on such theories, that helps researchers and practitioners judge the quality of pretend play. Keywords: Lev Vygotsky; mature play; Mature Play Observation Tool; play and child development; self-regulationIt may sound counterintuitive to turn to theories now almost a century old to answer questions about the current state of knowledge about play, but these long-standing insights first advanced by the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the early twentieth century now help us understand the role of play in child development in general and the development of self-regulation in particular. As we developed, implemented, and evaluated Tools of the Mind, the Vygotskian-based, early-childhood curriculum, we often found it necessary to defend the major role awarded to make-believe play in this curriculum (Bar- nett et al. 2008; Diamond et al. 2007). That we should even need to defend play arises from recent social changes, which we discuss later. But prevailing rules of educational research-today's allegedly practical approaches-now assume that the measurement of isolated skills over discrete intervals of time will accu- rately reflect the mechanisms of development. This assumption imposes high expectations on any play-based intervention, however, because it presupposes that a successful intervention will produce immediate results measurable by standardized instruments. Vygotsky, in contrast, took a longer view and also took account of the cultural setting of the classroom, including the relations between students and teachers.In 1927 Vygotsky explored the limitations of narrow empirical approaches in his foundational work The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology (Vygotsky 1997). Post-Vygotskians today maintain that the difference in meth- odologies underlying the design of Vygotskian-based interventions and the methodologies often now used to evaluate their effectiveness make it difficult to provide a definitive answer about which components of play do have an effect on specific areas of development.The familiar Vygotskian contention that in play a child becomes "a head taller than himself" has, over the last half century, been applied to a wide range of play and playful behaviors. Yet the basic question remains: how do we know if a child in fact functions at a higher level when engaged in play? Further, to understand the importance of play, we need to ask if Vygotsky's optimal zone of proximal development requires a specific kind of play. And if it does, we need to find which characteristics of play will prove most beneficial for child development. In this article, we examine the main principles of the Vygotskian and post-Vygotskian approach to play and focus on the relationship between play and self-regulation. We introduce the concept of mature make-believe play and attempt to measure "levels" of play based on Vygotsky's theories. …