More Than Just Fun and Games: Definition, Development, and Intervention for Children’s Play and Social Skills

Abstract

All children can play and everyone needs friends. Play and social interaction provide a natural and powerful context for ongoing learning and development throughout childhood. The importance of skill acquisition in these areas has consistently been recognized by practitioners and researchers in the fields of education, developmental psychology, applied behavior analysis (ABA), and other related disciplines for decades (e.g., Bijou & Baer, 1961; Lifter, Foster-Sandra, Arzamarski, Briesch, & McClure, 2011; Lifter, Mason, & Barton, 2011; Lovaas, Baer, & Bijou, 1965; Piaget, 1962; Vygotsky, 1933). This widespread and long-standing recognition is due to a robust body of research linking proficiency in play and social skills to physical, intellectual, and emotional functioning as well as research demonstrating that interventions that improve children’s play and social skills may also occasion collateral gains in other areas such as language, academics, and motor skill development (Elkind, 2007; Lifter et al., 2011; Ozonoff et al., 2008; Pierucci, Barber, Gilpin, Crisler, & Klinger, 2015; Singer & Lythcott, 2004). For example, even the simple forms of social interaction and play that occur in the first year of life such as shaking a rattle, pushing over a block tower, and batting at a hanging crib mobile require children to practice emerging motor skills (e.g., coordination of arm movements to bat the mobile) and early problem-solving strategies (e.g., obtaining an out-of-reach rattle by pulling the blanket the rattle rests on). Learning opportunities continue to arise in the context of play and social interaction throughout childhood, and increasingly complex behaviors such as sharing, turn-taking, and social problem solving become necessary for children to interact and play with one another.