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Reveals how young children's pretend play emerges as a deeply social and culturally shaped activity, shaped through everyday interactions with caregivers.
How do children learn to pretend—and why is it never just child's play? In Pretending at Home, Wendy L. Haight and Peggy J. Miller look at the development of pretend play in young children, demonstrating that it is fundamentally a social and cultural activity rather than a solitary pastime.
Through detailed, long-term observations of nine children and their mothers, Pretending at Home reveals how everyday interactions shape the emergence, structure, and functions of pretend play. The authors explore the interpersonal dynamics, social rules, and physical environments that influence how children and caregivers engage in imaginative activity, offering new insights into early childhood development.
Richly illustrated with portraits of children at play and backed by meticulous analysis, Pretending at Home challenges conventional notions about childhood imagination and shows how pretend play fosters social understanding, creativity, and learning within everyday life. Essential reading for researchers, students, and practitioners in child development, psychology, and education, Haight and Miller open a window into the intimate, formative world of early pretend play.
"Pretending at Home provides a close look at how young, middle-class, Euroamerican children and their mothers engage in pretend play. Haight and Miller argue that pretend play is, from its origins, a social, not a solitary, activity. The rich analysis of the play episodes of nine children and their caregivers over the first few years of their lives together yields a very solid portrayal of the development of pretend play. The volume contributes to a growing interest in understanding how children's development occurs through interactions with their companions in everyday sociocultural activities." — Barbara Rogoff, The University of California, Santa Cruz
"Haight and Miller's Pretending at Home is a landmark volume. It directly challenges long-standing notions about the solitary nature of pretend play by clearly locating it in a social and cultural framework. The combination of intensive, quantitative observations and insightful, qualitative analysis is impressive." — Ross D. Parke, Director, Center for Family Studies, University of California, Riverside
"This extensive, long-term, naturalistic study provides solid data on the ontogeny of pretend play. It shows, for the first time, how pretending emerges as a social activity in the course of everyday life. These findings will be invaluable to students of normal development in our mainstream cultures as well as offering a base for comparison with different cultural traditions or with environments in which the growth of pretending is discouraged or disrupted." — Catherine Garvey, University of Maine, Orono
Wendy L. Haight is Assistant Professor at the University of Utah. Peggy J. Miller is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
1. Introduction
2. Studying Everyday Pretending
3. How Much Do Children Pretend?
4. The Interpersonal Context of Everyday Pretending
5. The Social Conduct of Everyday Pretending
6. Immediate Outcomes of Mothers' Participation in Pretend Play
7. The Social Functions of Everyday Pretending
8. The Physical Ecology of Everyday Pretending
9. A Summary of Major Findings: Portraits of Kathy and Charlie
10. Conclusions
Appendix A. Subcategories of Pretending
Appendix B. Ambiguous Actions Excluded from Analyses of Pretending
References
Author Index
Subject Index