[HN Gopher] Why Do the Children (Pretend) Play? [pdf]
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Why Do the Children (Pretend) Play? [pdf]
Author : lofties
Score : 22 points
Date : 2021-08-21 06:38 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ctheory.sitehost.iu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ctheory.sitehost.iu.edu)
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Seems like the most obvious answer is that the child is
| practicing/training for future real world situations they will
| encounter.
|
| In the days before TV etc, what was the alternative? Sitting
| there with their minds blank? It seems obvious that pretend play
| helps them develop their minds and capabilities.
| pletnes wrote:
| Listening to pretend play chatter (as a parent), I find that
| topics in the play world often reflect recent real world
| events. I always figured that children must be reprocessing and
| reinterpreting their experiences for learning and
| understanding.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| My daughter is seven and she is a hard core pretend-player.
| Hers rarely have much to do with real world events (about 50%
| of the time she is pretending to be an animal, these days
| mostly tigers and cheetahs and such but often unicorns etc),
| but they do get pretty elaborate.
|
| I always thought of dreams as being a lot of reprocessing and
| reinterpreting.
|
| Either way, watching kids do this (which is fascinating and I
| will miss it when she grows out of it) makes me wonder why
| anyone would question the value of it. Just like physical
| play (running jumping climbing throwing etc) will prepare you
| for when you need it, such as when you need to hunt for food
| or avoid being hunted.
| Thorentis wrote:
| I know the whole "children back in my day" thing occurs for every
| generation, but I seriously think there was some kind of turning
| point or singularity that accelerated decline with the advent of
| the smartphone. Pretend play, learning to have fluent spoken
| conversation, regulating emotions with other people, negotiating
| - all replaced with screen time and online-only interactions that
| humans are not adapted for.
| warent wrote:
| These things are so new, the effects of this are still
| completely unclear. You may ultimately be right in saying
| "decline" but that word still feels premature because
| objectively we don't know.
|
| Take a look at human history and consider how often we have
| behaved in antisocially as we harassed, harmed, or otherwise
| slaughtered each other by the hundreds of millions. It's not as
| if we're some ideal model that would be bad for future
| generations to completely deviate from.
|
| Therefore my hypothesis is that it's equally possible something
| so dramatic and counterintuitive as the changes we see these
| days may actually be necessary to create a world we've only
| dreamed to achieve for millennia.
| speeder wrote:
| I am currently trying to get used to NOT play on cellphones
| myself, I don't have children yet but I want to have them soon,
| and I don't want them to interact with cellphones at all until
| a certain age.
|
| I created a company, named "Kidoteca", to make games for small
| kids, the main idea of the company wasn't mine, but to me it
| felt a good idea.
|
| But after I saw the behaviour of other kids when interacting
| with cell phones, for example my nephews and little cousins, it
| became clear to me it was a net negative, for example one thing
| I noticed: my nephews whenever they see me, they immediately
| demand to see my phone, and sometimes they get outright
| aggressive about it, after a while that I've stopped letting
| them use my phone, it got better, but after another person gave
| them a phone to use, all their bad behaviour came back, with
| them getting aggressive all over again.
| watwut wrote:
| Based on my observation, it is training for future negotiations.
| Pretend play is a lot of negotiating and less playing.
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