As a caveat, I should note at the outset that the varieties of play that I list and describe below are not mutually exclusive categories. Any given instance of play that you observe is likely to combine more than one of these varieties. But I think you will recognize, in the list, the range of types of play that we take more or less for granted in children, because we see them everywhere. I ask, as you read this essay, to not take play for granted; think about its extraordinary value to the developing child.

Locomotor play

All, or at least nearly all, young mammals engage in locomotor play, such as playful running and leaping, and young humans are no exception. People everywhere must learn to control their own bodies, to move quickly and effectively through space, to avoid falls, and to recover from falls that inevitably occur. As I noted in a previous essay in this blog, toddlers spend an average of six hours a day at playful walking--walking for no other purpose than the fun of it. In the process they become experts at the universal human skill of two-legged walking. After walking comes running, jumping, climbing, swinging, and--depending on the environment and culture--swimming, bicycling, roller blading, ice skating, cartwheeling, and all sorts of other ways of experiencing the thrill of movement. Children, and adults too, do all this for no other reason than fun, but in the process they acquire skills that may save their lives many times in the future.

Rough and tumble play

Overlapping with locomotor play is rough-and-tumble play, playful chasing and fighting, which we also share with other mammals. Like all mammals, we are physical beings that need fit bodies for life's work and emergencies. Rough-and-tumble play builds strength, coordination, and endurance. Children on their own initiative don't lift weights or run laps to keep in shape. Nothing would be more dull and wearisome than that. Instead, they chase one another around, and maybe wrestle or play at sword fighting, to happy exhaustion, many times per day if they have the opportunity. Nothing is more fun that that!

In most cultures boys and girls engage about equally at playful chasing, but boys everywhere engage in more playful fighting than do girls. Play fighting is sometimes confused with real fighting by adults who don’t look closely at it, but for anyone who looks closely the distinction is clear. In fact, it is not unreasonable to say that play fighting is the opposite of serious fighting. In a real fight the purpose is to hurt the other person and/or make that person run away. In a play fight the purpose, quite deliberately, is to go through fighting motions without hurting the other person or making that person want to leave. Some researchers have argued that a major function of play fighting, beyond pure physical exercise, is to help children learn restraint and especially to help boys learn how to be in close and peaceful proximity with other boys. Play fighting is one of the ways by which boys bond. We might think of it as boys’ means of hugging. But I’ll save that story for a future essay.

Language play

We are the linguistic animal, and so we have language play that teaches us to talk. Nobody has to teach language to young children. They learn it on their own, through play. The earliest stages of language play involve the production of language-like sounds. At about 2 months of age, infants begin to make repeated, drawn-out vowel-like cooing sounds--ooh-ooh-ooh, eeh-ahhh-eeh-ahhh. At about 4 or 5 months of age, the cooing gradually changes to babbling, as the baby begins to put consonant and vowel sounds together--ba-ba-boo-ba-ga-da-da-da-badada. Such cooing and babbling is clearly play. It only occurs when the baby is happy; it has structure; it is self-motivated; it is not done to get something--it is done purely for its own sake. All that makes it play. With time, the babbled sounds come increasingly to resemble the sounds of the child's native language, and by about one year of age the child's first words appear and may be repeated over and over in a playful manner.

As children grow older they begin to play with simple grammatical constructions. Many years ago, as research for her doctoral dissertation, Ruth Hirsch Weir recorded and analyzed the "crib speech" of her son Anthony, when he was 28 to 30 months of age. Because this speech occurred when Anthony was alone in his crib, it clearly did not involve an attempt to communicate; it was pure play. Some of Anthony's crib speech is reminiscent of the repetitive phrases, with systematic variation, that you might hear in recordings made for self-instruction in a foreign language. Here's an example [From Weir's book, "Language in the Crib."]:

"What color? What color blanket? What color mop? What color glass? ... Not the yellow blanket, the white. It's not black, it's yellow. Not yellow, red."

In the first part of this sequence Anthony is playing with his new ability to ask about the colors of things and is consolidating his understanding of color words. In the second part he continues playing with color words, but now the focus is on negating and correcting.

Playful language practice doesn't occur just when children are alone; it also occurs in pseudo-communicative exchanges with others. The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget gave, as an example, the following exchange between his 3-year-old daughter and himself [in his book, "Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood"]:

What's that? (she asked, looking at a picture) -- It's a cowshed. -- Why?-- It's a house for cows. -- Why? -- Because there are cows in it, do you see? -- Why are they cows? -- Don't you see? They've got horns. -- Why have they horns? ... and so on, and so on.

The daughter here was almost certainly not asking questions to get information; rather, she was playfully exercising her newfound capacity to ask questions and elicit responses from her father. All of us who have spent time with young children have experienced similar exchanges. They can be frustrating or fun, depending on whether we take them as serious questions or recognize them as linguistic play.

With still further development, children's language play can involve puns, rhymes, alliterations, and deliberate distortions of grammar, all of which help the child consolidate his or her growing understanding of linguistic sounds, words, grammar, and meanings. Listen closely to the playful language of any young child, alone or in pseudo-dialogues, and you will find many instances of practice at constructions that represent a joyful challenge to the child.

Exploratory play