The Dunn and Munn’s Cambridge Sibling Study (Dunn, 1988) highlighted the association between co-operative joint pretend play between siblings and the consequent development of social understanding and competence. Dunn said that it is the emotional quality of the sibling relationship that is important for children’s social development and that play requires a mutual understanding and social awareness in order to co-ordinate moods and behaviour. The study emphasised the complementary and reciprocal features of the sibling, for example, Dunn showed how an older sibling can help the younger sibling by giving them specific directions or role-playing instructions so that they can make a proper contribution to the play. This is in line with the developmental theory of social constructivism by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) who said that children learn through social interaction whereby they appropriate (adapt the current cultural tools) their thinking. Dunn also found that the level of complexity in children’s interactions increased significantly with age, for example, where they could initially (at eight months) only share in mood and action, they can later contest and negotiate within the pretend play framework. This growth strongly suggests that play with siblings are important for development because through these interactions children learn skills such as how to co-operate and construct their development and understanding. However, other factors in the child’s environment also play a significant role in the development of their social outlook, such as talking about their view of other’s intentions and motives, otherwise first-born children wouldn’t be able to acquire this skill.
Collaboration with peers, it seems, can advance cognitive as well as social development (Howe, 1993). Studies that focus on this aspect of development, examine how children learn to handle the complexity of social life, for example how children negotiate with others through their play. The BBC started such a longitudinal study, “Child of our Time”, by recording the lives of 25 children in the year 2000 to find out what makes us who we are. They confirmed that being part of a social group and being exposed to others improves learning and development and that by the age of three children start to play together rather than side by side. Other aspects of play that influence development include masking your own feelings, turn-taking, laughter and imitation. In fact, it was Albert Bandura (1924- ) who said that “… from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviours are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action” (Bandura, 1977, p. 22). Child of our Time recreated Bandura’s classic Bobo doll study (1965) and found that children mimics and learns through play and that the social skills learned during the critical year of three, profoundly effect our capacity as adults.
Being part of a social group thus furthers development but friendship can also lead to conflict. Another longitudinal study by Blatchford and colleagues (1990), investigated how children’s perspectives on the playground change as they move through junior school and into secondary school. They found that in the course of the early school years pretend play gradually disappears from the noticeable behaviour of children as games with rules (for example football, marbles, hopscotch) become predominant. These studies therefore strongly suggest that the developmental improvement could be due to play because the play itself develops and becomes more intricate with age. By 16 years social life and friendships are independent of particular activities and a more obvious youth culture is evident. They also identified a specific break-time playground culture which adults are not a part of. Without the guidance of adults, children have to regulate their playground space and games, manage teasing, conflict and bullying and as a result they develop a more progressive and individual social understanding. “The other feature of friendship that is a key contributor to children’s growing understanding of the social world is that it marks the beginning of a new independence from parents. Children,… grow up not in isolated nuclear families, but within a wider world of others, including children – sisters, brothers, playmates, loose-knit gangs of children. This world of other children means opportunities for friendship, enmities, gang life, leaders and followers. It means opportunities for working out the intricate balance of power and status between people, for sharing imaginative experiences, for understanding and manipulating the feelings and ideas of others, for a range of relationships that differ greatly from those of parents-with-children.” (Dunn, 2004)
When considering the developmental significance of children’s playful interactions with siblings and peers, one could recognize two things according to Pelligrini (2003) who studied adolescents’ “rough and tumble play” (R&T) and playfighting through observation and also by interviewing some of the young people themselves.
First, that within a particular group, the functions of the interactions may change with age - for example, playfighting in younger children does not relate to aggression, whereas in adolescent males it is related to real fighting in other words aggression and dominance. Second, that even when at a similar age, the functions of playful interactions may be different for different groups of children – for example boys and girls. Smith et al. (1999) highlighted the significance of playfighting and its consequent impact on development and said that important social skills and abilities could so be practised. These include communications skills (such as encoding and decoding play signals), the ability to regulate emotional display and physical strength (as restraint is necessary in playfighting) and turn-taking skills together with the ability to understand another person’s point of view (as with role-reversals and self-limiting behaviour). Smith et al. (1999) distinguished between positive conflicts, for example playfighting and negative conflicts, for example aggression and said that even these negative conflicts are useful in preparing children for later adult life and thus furthers development.
Peer collaboration and the joint solving of a problem have significant benefits for development and learning in both children and adults (Miell and Littleton 2004; Littleton et al., 2004). In these joint efforts, play and humour, which is often seen in more formal work settings, for example school and in problem solving situations, combine with successful co-operation and collaboration to achieve the necessary goal. The skills that children learn by negotiating and managing their differences in perspectives and competing aims during these interactions with humour, also become important skills for learning and intellectual development (Littleton et al., 2004). An example of this progression can be seen in the joint story writing task between two eight-year-old friends where jokes are being made when deciding on the characters. Even though this interaction could easily look like two boys messing about, it is actually a reflective process where they evaluate, contemplate and modify each proposition as they progress along the path of joint understanding, knowledge and development (Vass, 2004, p. 161).
Play could therefore be viewed as skilled interaction that furthers development just like other types of non-play interaction with both siblings and peers. Many of the grand developmental theories support this idea that children’s development is influenced by play. For instance, social constructivism sees the child learning and developing with the help of a more competent person through the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which is very similar to the complementary play interaction, as described by Schaffer (2003). Vygotsky’s idea of a teacher passing on cultural tools could furthermore relate to the “anticipatory socialisation” concept described by Stone (1981). Social learning theory highlighted imitation as a vital part of development and this is very much evident in the play interaction between especially siblings where they mimic each other. Constructivism identified stages of intellectual development that corresponds in some ways to how children’s play change, as they grow older. For instance, they start by playing by themselves, focussing on a single aspect of play, but as representations form, they can start to pretend that objects are something different. As they learn to generate rules, so also does their play change to games based on rules.
There are various limitations to the accounts of psychologists with regard to the above research examining play. The research follows mostly an inductive (theory building), qualitative approach, which means that researchers are more concerned with qualities such as the nature of a child’s attentiveness or how they describe themselves in a narrative. As most of the above research makes use of naturally occurring events (quasi-experiments), the researcher has less control over the behaviour that are being analysed. There are also some criticisms with regards to evaluating qualitative research for validity and reliability because the research does not follow the traditional approach to psychology.
Within the qualitative approach, researchers tend to focus on the narrative by using verbal transcripts of the interaction, which are coded for specific behaviours, and this data is then analysed. The method of choice for this analysis for most researchers is discourse analysis. One drawback of using transcripts is that they do not completely reproduce every aspect of the interaction such as the children’s movements and expressions. Transcribers tend to pay attention to different aspects of the talk depending on their interest and therefore the transcription is an interpretation of the real event and could be subject to bias. In a classic account of “Transcription as theory”, Ochs suggested that: “transcription is a selective process reflecting theoretical goals and definitions” (1979, p. 44). On the other hand, researchers usually work in their analysis from both the audio and video record of the interaction and the transcription, which puts the data in context and they also recognise the value of self-report data (reflexivity) and actually asking the children what they feel about play and playtime.
Existing research is more focussed on the face to face interaction between children and this is not an accurate representation of children in especially affluent societies. Children communicate more and more through the internet and on mobile phones as a result of technology developing and this limits the scope of the research already done. Vital other areas still remain unexplored in this context. Furthermore, the account of peer and sibling interactions is mostly based on research conducted in Western industrialised settings. Therefore no conclusions can be made as to how the nature and extent of peer and sibling interactions are influenced by the specific social and cultural contexts within which the child is developing.
The above research strongly suggests that children’s development is significantly influenced by play with siblings and peers. Play interaction constitutes a powerful site for the development of especially social skills and understanding and consequent general development. From the research methods and accounts of psychologists that have been covered, it is clear that there are some issues concerning the evaluation of the research for validity and reliability due to a non-traditional approach. Some popular qualitative methods such as discourse analysis also needs more work on its theory and practice. These issues are minor because researchers are already taking them into account for example, by introducing concepts such as reflexivity. The existing empirical research that underpin the grand theories of development and its supporting relationship with the above studies mean that the qualitative research discussed can be taken as evidence that play with siblings and peers influence children’s development.
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References
Bandura, A. (1965), cited in Oates, Sheehy and Wood (2005) p. 61.
Blatchford, P., Creeser, R. and Mooney, A. (1990), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 106
Corsaro, W. (1986), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 117
Dunn, J. (1988), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 115
Dunn, J. (2004), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 98
Garvey, C. (1990) Play, London, Fontana.
Howe, C. (1993), cited in Schaffer, H. R. (2004) Introducing child Psychology, Oxford, Blackwell.
Leacock, E. (1976), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 118
Littleton, K., Miell, D. and Faulkner, D. (2004), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 119
Miell, D. and Littleton, K. (2004), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 119
Ochs, E. (1979), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 99
Pelligrini, A. D. (2003), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 104
Schaffer, H. R. (2003), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 96
Smith, P. K., Bowers, L., Binney, V and Cowie, H. (1999), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 107
Stone, G. P. (1981), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005)
Vass, E. (2004, unpublished), cited in Littleton and Miell (2005) p. 119
Vygotsky, L. (1978), cited in “Theories of development”, in Oates, Wood and Grayson. (2005)
