Play and emotions: the role of physical play on children’s social well-being

Abstract

Play is an important context for children’s emotional and social development. During play, children perceive a sense of freedom and safety that encourages children to try out and master their skills, without a fear of failure. There is a wide variation in children’s play patterns; children play with objects, they pretend to be someone else, climb, chase one another, or have play fights. Although most play research has been focused on pretend play, observational studies have shown that children spend a considerable amount of time engaged in physical play, such as running, catching or wrestling, especially when in outdoors. To date little is known about the importance of physical play in children’s emotion socialization. Physical play can be categorized in two forms: exercise and rough-and-tumble play. Both forms involve moderate to vigorous playful body activity, which is accompanied by a physiological arousal. In addition, rough-and-tumble play involves role taking, requires children to accurately read their partners’ emotional and intentional expressions, control their anger impulses, and cope with frustration. Recent research has shown that exercise play, especially when engaged with peers, is related to emotion understanding and emotion regulation, but less is clear for rough-and-tumble play. Understanding how both forms of physical play are related to emotional development offers a different approach, when thinking about pedagogical and therapeutic practices, especially when we consider children with communication impairments (e.g. children with hearing loss or autism) who might prefer to engage their peers’ in physical play rather than in pretend play.