Culture, Emotions, and Play

How do children learn to play?  How does play relate to emotional development?  How does culture shape both play and emotions?  Gaskins & Miller (2009) wrote a terrific article that examined these questions by comparing research with two distinct cultural groups—European-American middle class and Yucatec Mayan families.  Children’s engagement in pretend play was significantly different in each of these groups.  Children from the European-American middle class families were encouraged to engage in pretend play and were provided with resources such as toys and representations of fictional characters through television and reading.  For these children, pretend play offered opportunities to explore emotions, develop a repertoire of emotions, and explore the themes represented by fictional characters.  Children from the Yucatec Mayan families were noted to have less time to engage in pretend play as children were more involved in other functions in the family.  Their play tended to mimic the adult patterns that they observed around them and they had limited exposure to fictional characters.  

Gaskins & Miller’s work demonstrates that context has tremendous influence.  From a young age, social experience fosters ideas about how and what to do.  Children develop a social and emotional repertoire of behavior based on what they observe around them and opportunities they have for exploration.  The skills that they develop are often highly adaptive for their environment.  Children in the Yucatec Mayan families are developing an emotional repertoire that will likely serve them well in that environment.  My only critique of this work is that it presents some broad generalizations.  It was my experience working as a developmental therapist for early intervention, that there were some significant differences between individual families related to how play was supported in the family.  I worked in some homes where toys were plentiful, but the child struggled with organizing around play.  In other homes, the toys might have been fewer, but the play was rich.  As families moved through different transitions, the role of play sometimes changed.  Also, there are individual differences in children.  Some children will take the resources they are presented with and self-regulate their own play experiences.  Other children benefit from support to encourage and expand their play.  

The research presented by Gaskins & Miller is significant in that it reminds us to be aware of our own cultural lens.  They write, “cultural assumptions shared by researchers and participants were so familiar that they were nearly invisible” (p. 6).  We need to step back and examine experiences through a wider lens in order to be more aware of how context shapes development and learning.  It is, however, also important to adjust our lens between macro-culture and micro-culture levels of understanding.  Within each group, there may be a variety of experiences.  Play can serve as an important way that children learn about the world around them and develop a repertoire that will help develop adaptive behaviors for their local context.

 

To further extend on this idea, consider what happens when a child transitions between one context to another such as from home to school.  Sometimes the patterns of family learning serve the child well for adaptive behaviors in the school setting.  In other circumstances, however, there may be differences between the child’s skills and the demands of the context.  I once had a student who was an elementary school teacher.  She had a young student who was presenting with some challenging classroom behaviors.  The child constantly demanded attention.  When the teacher explored more about the child’s context, she found out that the child lived in a very crowded home environment and he was one of the youngest members of the family.  It is likely that the attention seeking behaviors were a means of survival in a crowded home environment.  Those skills that were adaptive in the home environment created challenge in the school environment.  Once the teacher viewed the student through this lens, she focused on teaching him a new repertoire of social and emotional behaviors that would serve him better in the school environment.  

Children learn from their environment.  They learn to adapt to that environment.  In our roles of parents, educators, therapist, or researchers, we can support that learning.

Gaskins, S. & Miller, P. (2009). The cultural roles of emotions in pretend play. In Clark, C.D. (Ed.)

                Transactions at Play. University Press of America.