Children who demonstrate pretend play ability as toddlers have significantly fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties at ...

For children, rocks can be spaceships. Pens can be fairies. And this kind of play can help protect mental health in childhood ...

Many people often think of play in the form of images of young children at recess engaging in games of tag, ball, using slides, swings, and physically exploring their environments. But physical play ...

Meghan Walbert is Lifehacker's Managing Editor. She has a degree in journalism and has worked at Lifehacker as a writer and editor since 2018, covering parenting, foster care, online child safety, and ...

Researchers say there is evidence infants are exploring the world of make-believe before they're even aware they are doing it. A new study exploring the origins of pretend play suggests infants ...

From developing social skills to fostering creativity, pretend play in young children is likened to being a "metaphoric multivitamin" in an editorial published in the journal Neuroscience and ...

Pretend play begins around 2 years of age, increases around 3-4 years of age, and declines again around 6 years of age, at which time children begin transitioning to playing more games with rules ...

Julia Wolf analyzes the importance of pretend play for exploring the development of social cognition. The ability to adopt another person’s perspective is important for social cognition and, ...

Children are incorporating Covid-19 into pretend play. By Paul L. Underwood Last month, I popped into one of my favorite local restaurants. The place is known for its eccentric menu, created daily ...

A young shopper at Pretend City Children’s Museum in Irvine tossed toy groceries into the toy shopping cart and pushed it toward the pretend supermarket check out. Another child typed away on a toy ...

Pretend play is associated with a host of enhanced cognitive abilities such as executive function, language and perspective taking, which are important to education, making the minimization of pretend ...