Stages of play
Babies are born with three needs. Sleep, food and toileting, that’s it, they lack the physical strength to interact with the world around them. As they age they develop a need to explore the world around them, this should start out with activities guided by their parents but will eventually evolve into playing with there peers. The thing is that each stage of this development, comes with it’s own stage of play. There are six stages of play, each comes with its own distant features and milestones in your child’s social development.
Unoccupied play, this is the first stage of play and is characterised by baby making uncoordinated movements at random with seemingly no purpose. Often babies will grow out of this stage of play by the time that there three months old. It’s not playing so much as it is your child building the mobility to interact with the world around them. Solitary play normally starts when a baby is about three months old and is the second stage of play. Children in this stage of play will play on there own and showing no interest in other children regardless of the presents of other children. Solitary play will often flow into other stages of play and will last until their two years old.
The ‘terrible twos’ are a time of huge social development, along side solitary play we move into onlooker play. This is where children will watch the children play with a given toy without engaging with the other child. Its like walking a dog, as they past another dog they will sniff at one another but that doesn’t mean that they are friends. Another stage of play two year olds go though is parallel play. This is where two or more children will play side by side with limited interaction often with similar toys. Children of this age still have no real concept of peer to peer friendship preferring to interact with trusted adults such as parents, relatives, guardians and educators.
Associative play builds on parallel play and is signified when children start to interact with their peers though out play. Now lets be clear, they still don’t have the same concepts of friendships that we do but they will start to lend and borrow toys from one another, typically children begin this stage of play at around three years old. At around this age you’ll often find within a co-ed group, the girls and boys will start to seperate out by gender often forming there own little clicks with the children they enjoy associating with more.
Cooperative play is the children start playing games, requiring roles, with their peers and working toward a shared outcome. They may ask a few friends to play ‘hide and seek’, ‘families’ or ‘what’s the time mister wolf’ with them over the previous trusted adult. Often this begins when your child is four years old and starts to develop the sense of friendship that we as adults have. Your child will still be far more likely to develop a click with other children of there own gender. This stage of play ofter continues until there 10 years old.
To conclude, your eleven month old doesn’t have friends. They have to learn the social skills to make friends, your two year old won’t have friends in the way that us adults see friendship either and for the same reason. Babies aren’t born with a need for socialisation, children don’t develop this need until they’re two and a half or three and even then it’s limited.