Children's Imaginative Play: A Visit to Wonderland (Child Psychology and Mental Health) - Hardcover

Ariel, Shlomo; Sutton-Smith, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0275977579 ISBN 13: 9780275977573

Publisher: Praeger, 2002

Synopsis

In this visit to the wonderland of children's imaginative, make-believe play, readers are be exposed to both a general, bird's-eye view of the whole of this fascinating realm, and to a closer look at its diverse regions. This volume examines the borderlines between make-believe play and akin phenomena such as dreams, drama, and rituals. Readers will become acquainted with the secret codes of make-believe play. These codes are activated in both covert and overt power struggles among children as well as in the child's internal theater of emotions. Readers will have the opportunity to examine these uses by looking at real-life sociodramatic play scenes. Also, the development of make-believe play and its interface with the child's general cognitive and socioemotional development is traced. This volume enables readers to consider children of various cultures at play, and investigates whether make-believe play and its characteristics are universal or culture-specific.

Make-believe play has been investigated across fields including cognitive, clinical, developmental, and social psychology, as well as linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. In this book, a comprehensive, integrative model is proposed, in which all of these approaches are synthesized into a single, coherent whole. The unifying hypothesis behind this synthesis is that make-believe play is a semiotic system, a body of signs and symbols, a language by means of which children express themselves and communicate. This language enables children to regulate and balance both their inner emotional life and their social life. Another central hypothesis is therefore that make-believe play functions as an homeostatic feedback mechanism for controlling the level of arousal around the child's central concerns, as well as the level of interpersonal conflict around issues of social proximity and power. Therapeutic and education applications of make-believe play are derived from these hypotheses and their ramifications.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Ariel Shlomo's fascinating volume earned accolades from two top researchers in the field.

"It is a privilege to write the forward to a book which totally transforms this field of play study in such a novel and brilliant way," wrote Brian Sutton-Smith, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jerome L. Singer, Professor of Psychology and Child Study at Yale University, gave the book this endorsement: "As Shlomo Ariel guides the reader through observation, research and psychotherapy with children engaging in symbolic play, the experience is refreshing and enlightening. He has examined children's pretend or make-believe play with detailed attention to their language, their social interactions, and their cognitions. This is a challenging, thought-provoking book for readers interested in the science and clinical implications of early play. The analysis of children's spontaneous language and nonverbal communication processes is especially insightful and opens up further research opportunities."

About the Author:

SHLOMO ARIEL is Co-Director of the Integrative Psychotherapy Center in Ramat Gan, Israel. He is the author of Culturally Competent Family Therapy (Greenwood, 1999).

About this edition

• Publisher: Praeger
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0275977579
• ISBN 13: 9780275977573
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264