Why Pretend Play Is So Important

The transition to pretend play and spoken language is one of the most important developmental leaps your child will make. As he loosens his reliance on the concrete world and begins to imagine objects and behaviors in his mind, he can for the first time actually replay experiences for himself that have occurred in the past or in another setting. He is able to stretch his thinking skills by mentally creating new ideas that are made up of bits of behavior or feelings he has experienced before. These multisensory images can be held in his mind's eye for increasingly long periods of time, and he can call upon these images to help him make sense of the world. By age two, your toddler's memory is reliable enough so that he's able to deliver simple messages.

Your 28-month-old can thus easily imagine that the unfamiliar sight of billowing curtains in his bedroom are the same ghosts he saw in a spooky cartoon the day before. His mind has perceived a visual relationship between two separate images that seems logical to him. As he matures, he will refine his concept of how things are categorized in the real world. In the meantime, try to savor his new way of thinking, and recognize that it is a first cousin to the creative fires that fuel the imaginations of poets, writers, and philosophers.

Your child can also substitute symbols for real objects as he plays. One day you may catch him miming Mom's actions as she cooks at her stove. He'll busily stir his paintbrush in a plastic bucket, as if he were a master chef himself. His ability to use substitutes, or symbols, and feel a satisfaction in doing so, is a clear sign that your toddler is becoming an abstract thinker.

With his new ability to manipulate a world of symbols, your toddler has reached a much higher level of communication and awareness. Not only can he think about his behavior; now he is starting to be able to talk about it, too. You help this process along by gently entangling him in longer interactions with you. Instead of rushing to respond to his impatient bangs on the door or bellows for juice, try to maintain a "What's the big hurry?" quizzical expression on your face. Your looks and words can snare his attention, and encourage him to pause a moment before responding to his physical urge to act. He may even take a few seconds to consider a response, and hopefully you'll applaud his attempts to express himself.

The pleasure you both derive from such exchanges will motivate your toddler to communicate more. After all, any activity that is pleasurable tends to reproduce itself. He enjoys these exchanges of symbolic words, images, and behavior, and has a new sense of himself as a great pretender and a creative wordsmith. He's not simply a doer anymore, and is beginning to view you as something more than a loving responder to his needs and wishes. More and more, the two of you will be pleasurably relating through ideas—a real meeting of the minds. Your child will be showing a new social interest in you. He'll be starting to view you, and by extension other people, as an essential part of the fun he finds in pretend play and spoken conversation.

Your toddler also begins to see the world in a new way as he figures out how different images relate to one another and decides what he wants the world to be like. His ability to create his own images and through them to express his own unique thoughts and interests now increases. For example, you may think you know who your toddler's favorite playmate is, and turn to your child with a big smile on your face as you announce, "Danny's coming over." He may surprise you, however, and reveal that he's developed a special fondness for another child in his play group when he replies, "No! Want Jenny!" Now he is able to use his ability to create an image of Jenny in his mind to tell you exactly what he is thinking, even when it contradicts what you're thinking.

In addition, this use of images arms your toddler with the ability to label his emotions rather than being forced to act them out. The more verbal encouragement and pretend play you offer him, the more practice he will receive in picturing his feelings, and elevating them to the world of ideas and reason.

Without this ability to step back and reflect on his ideas and feelings, and eventually to articulate them, your toddler would experience them only as a tightness in his belly, twitching fingers, a trembling in his arms, or as a host of other physical sensations. He might be at the mercy of these wordless sensations and may feel compelled to use his muscles to reduce the uncomfortable tension building up inside him. Like pugnacious barroom brawlers who throw their punches first and ask questions later, such toddlers may become locked into aggressive, physical behavior patterns. Alternatively, they may become passive or inhibited.

Fostering symbolic expression in your child is thus a critically important tool in teaching him to understand the world and to experience and understand and communicate all the emotions that are a part of him. As he hears and uses more words and ideas to express his feelings during this stage of his development, neuronal connections in the parts of the brain dealing with verbal language (often the left side) are becoming more dense. As your child grows older, this specialization may facilitate his ability to sequence language in precise grammatical configurations. A growing density of neurons in the parts of his brain used for visualizing images is also occurring now. This richer neuronal network may support his ability to visualize images in his mind, which may in turn enhance his growing capacity to use his imagination and engage in pretend play, as well as to begin to more fully understand spatial relations.

It is interesting that posterior portions of both the right and left sides of your toddler's brain also show activity during this stage, as he acquires the use of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Perhaps the part of his brain dealing with emotional meanings is now working together with the parts that deal with grammar and sequencing of words so that his ideas are given meaning by his emotional experience of the world. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives do require lots of understanding and meaning, while grammar may follow more concrete rules. Thus, different parts of his brain may be growing and becoming more specialized and related to each other as language and meanings are blossoming together.