Abstract
Linking children’s pretense with creativity has a long tradition. Most authors claim that pretending children exercise divergent thinking, so they can generate many diverse ideas. We show that focusing on divergent thinking when describing the creative features of pretense is not enough. Both pretending and creating are not only about thinking ideas, but also about acting, exploring the surroundings, and adjusting oneself to other people and to the ongoing happenings. Furthermore, both pretending and creating do not entirely rely on generating many and various ideas or actions, as they also include exploration and evaluation of the outcomes. Consequently, we propose to link creativity and pretense by focusing on children’s exploratory and evaluative actions. In our view, pretend play is a creative activity resulting in outcomes that are both novel and valuable.
If pretend play is a form of “voluntary transformation of the Here and Now, the You and Me, and the This or That,” as it is treated by Garvey (1990, p. 82), among others, then it must be somehow related to creativity. Basically, creating is about transforming things, behaviors, or situations. Some authors have already linked children’s pretense and creativity by showing that the former has an evolutionary function of enhancing the latter (e.g., Carruthers, 2006; Nielsen, 2012). 1 These and other authors claim that both pretense and creativity engage mental skills like generating ideas, supposing, symbolic thinking, or recombining of objects and images, as well as both engaging similar affective processes (Picciuto & Carruthers, 2014; Russ, 2016).
Among these cognitive abilities, one is particularly often used as a pretense–creativity connector: it is so-called divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is competence at generating a lot of diverse ideas in response to an open problem, and it has been traditionally regarded as a mental facilitator of creating (Guilford, 1968). Many researchers claim that this mode of thinking is already used by pretending children who can generate multiple ideas or associations during their play (see Dansky, 1980; Lieberman, 1977; Pepler & Ross, 1981; Russ, 2014, 2016; Russ et al., 1999; Saracho, 2002; Singer & Singer, 1990; Vandenberg, 1980, among others). For this reason especially, pretend play is described as a precursor for creativity in adulthood.
In our view, focusing on divergent thinking when describing the possible creative features of pretense is not enough—creativity itself does not entirely rely on the generation of ideas, for it does also include active exploration and evaluation of the ideas and the emerging outcomes (Carruthers, 2011; Finke et al., 1992). Similarly, pretend play does not only consist of thinking or acting in many and various directions—claiming so brings a suggestion that “anything would go” when children pretend or that there are no frames for their play. This is, however, not the case (Bretherton, 1989). What is more, pretense is not essentially about thinking ideas, but it is more about acting and reacting: exploring some events or situations in the actual surroundings, as well as about adjusting one’s behavior to the behaviors of others and to the ongoing happenings (see Clark, 1997; Gibson, 1986; Rucińska, 2016, 2017; Szokolszky, 2006). Granting all this, we will propose a new way of connecting creativity and pretend play: this time, the focus will be much more on children’s exploratory and evaluative actions.
We start with an overview of the previous studies on divergent thinking, where we present selected ways of using this capacity in setting up the pretense–creativity links. Then, in the main parts of the article, we specifically describe our view on how an active exploration and evaluation might be manifested in children’s pretense. Doing all this, we hope to achieve the main goal of our analysis, which is to show pretend play itself as a form of creative activity (or a kind of psychological or minimal creativity) that results in outcomes that are both novel and valuable, at least from the perspective of the pretending child.
The creative pretend play: Divergent thinking
The key to grasping most of the previous studies on pretense–creativity connections is the phenomenon known as divergent thinking. From 1950—when an influential psychologist Joy P. Guilford gave his speech at the APA convention—divergent thinking started to be examined as the competence serving creativity in the first place. As Guilford (1950, 1968) proposed, it is the ability to generate a lot of diverse ideas in response to a problem of an open nature—a kind of thinking that goes in many different directions. The most popular measure for divergent thinking skills is the Alternate Uses Task (Wallach & Kogan, 1965), where the participant is asked to list as many uses as possible for a common item, such as a newspaper or a paper clip. Divergent thinking implies free associations and fluidity of thinking (Runco, 1992, 2004). According to Guilford, being able to generate many ideas and to think in a fluent way can increase one’s odds of producing an original idea or artifact. For these and other reasons, this specific mental capacity is broadly viewed as a critical component of creative processes in any domain (Runco, 1992).
Being such a popular concept, it is no wonder that divergent thinking has been ascribed to children’s pretend play as well. It remains one of the main connectors in the discussion on the pretense–creativity links. Why and how has this mental capacity been related to pretense so far? We find that there are two main themes in this discourse. One is focusing on the manifestations of divergent thinking in pretense while the second points to some affective and attentional processes of pretending children that enable their flexible attitude toward variety and superfluity.
Manifestations of divergent thinking in pretense
Describing creativity as “the production of association content that is abundant and that is unique,” as Wallach and Kogan (1965, p. 289) did, some would readily link it to pretend play with its acclaimed attitude towards ideational or behavioral variety (Vandenberg, 1980). This attitude might be manifested in children’s pretense in a few ways: (a) in acting out the roles of many and various characters and taking the perspectives of different human and non human beings, (b) in applying different solutions to the playful challenges, or (c) in using a wide range of objects (not only toys) to represent different things, mostly in the object–substitution play episodes (Russ, 2014; Singer & Singer, 1990; Vandenberg, 1980). For example, Russ (2004) observed that a 7-year-old girl, in the course of only one arranged pretend play session, used blocks to represent surprisingly many and various things, which included: a slide, a tunnel, a skyscraper, a telescope, a swing, and a butterfly.
By involving such a variety of ways of relating to an object, the circumstances of pretense are found to be similar to the situation of searching for alternative object uses in the popular divergent thinking tasks. According to Sutton-Smith (1968), the child’s play with objects gives him the opportunity to develop novel responses and diverse associations with these objects. In their empirical studies, Dansky and Silverman (1973) have demonstrated that children who used certain objects (such as screwdrivers, paper towels, or plastic cups) during their play generated significantly more alternative uses for those objects than did control groups. Later, Dansky (1980) proved that this effect is also found when the objects used at play are different from those employed in the Alternate Uses Task.
Singer and Singer (1990) specifically analyzed a kind of divergent language mode that is spontaneously employed within the context of pretense. As they claim, children who play make-believe gradually become aware of the unusual and various possibilities of vocabulary usage. Even though their first make-believe episodes rely mainly on entertaining the adult gestures and some passages from adult conversations, children recreate these gestures and narratives in their own playful manners. They link the movements, words, and phrases in ways that are found to be novel and surprising from the perspective of adults. Indeed, there is a significant redundancy not only in the motor gestures but also in the vocalization and narratives of children playing make-believe (Garvey & Berndt, 1975). In consequence, the pretending child might experience the generative powers of language, which then can lead him to exhibit more complicated narratives, both in play and out of play contexts.
Affective and attentional processes that enable ideation in pretense
To experience affects is claimed to be of great value for creativity (for a review, see Bass et al., 2008). Thus, because pretend play gives children an opportunity to express and experience emotions, it might lead them to higher creative performance as well. The specific affective processes to be found in pretend play include openness to experiencing different emotions; access to various affect-laden thoughts, images, and fantasies; and the affective pleasure of challenge and problem solving (Fein, 1987; Russ, 2014; Russ & Wallace, 2013). Some authors have empirically proven that processes of this kind facilitate the nonobvious associations and ideation of pretending children (Isen et al., 1987; Russ, 2014). Interestingly, Russ and colleagues (1999) demonstrated that a kind of affective pretend play is predictive of divergent thinking over a 4-year period. Namely, children who expressed more affect and better quality of fantasy in their puppet play stories as first and second graders expressed higher performance on divergent thinking tests 5 years later. 2
There are authors showing how positive affects specifically lead to nonobvious associations in the mind (Isen et al., 1987), or to a broader and more inclusive cognitive processing style (Friedman & Förster, 2002). Thus, having fun in make-believe play might actually enhance divergent thinking in children. Indeed, this was demonstrated in the studies of Lieberman (1977). She cued the term “playfulness” to describe a psychological trait of being engaged in play that consists of sense of humor, joy, and spontaneity (the last one may manifest in a physical, social, or cognitive way). According to her, playfulness is “the lightheartedness that we find as a quality of play in the young child’s activities and, later on, as the combinatorial play essential to imagination and creativity” (p. xi). In her studies, Lieberman reveals the correlational link between the joyful spontaneity occurring in kindergartners’ play and between their ideational fluency and flexibility, measured by special divergent thinking tasks.
According to Vandenberg (1980), both pretend play and creativity “share a healthy disregard for the familiar, and involve the creation of novelty from the commonplace” (p. 60). He agrees that pretense enhances a special attitude for a more flexible way of acting and thinking. He additionally notices that this attitude might be enabled by the broad attention of pretending children. In fact, creativity and divergent thinking are being linked with a specific attentional disposition to deploy one’s focus from the center to the periphery of a problem, or with “a greater readiness to utilize incidental cues” (Wallach, 1970, p. 1250). It has been experimentally tested that divergent thinking correlates with a defocused attention (Mandelsohn, 1976). If children’s make-believe play genuinely broadens their attention and enables reaching peripheral signals, then it may also be a place that is favorable for divergent thinking. Furthermore, pretense with its playful and spontaneous nature might also entail the so-called “leaky” attention (see Zabelina et al., 2016) that generally refers to deploying attention over a wider focus or a larger range of stimuli at once. Thanks to such an attentive “leakiness,” children can generate or discover some new directions for their pretend actions and narratives.
Not undermining the significance of the studies on divergent thinking, we think there is a need to move forward and investigate some other directions of linking pretense with creativity. Our proposition is based on two assumptions. First is that generation of ideas—let it be divergent thinking or any other type of ideation—is not the only element of creativity, nor is it the core of pretend play. Thus, the exclusive focus on generation does not give us a fair and complete picture of the sought connections between creativity and pretense. Moreover, claiming that the pretending child is mostly thinking in many diverse ways brings a suggestion that “anything would go” when she pretends—with no constraints. This is, however, not the case (Bretherton, 1989). Our second assumption is that pretense is not mainly about thinking ideas (in an all-of-a-sudden manner), but it is more about performing and exploring some events in the actual surroundings, as well as adjusting one’s behavior to these surroundings, to the behaviors of other people, and to the ongoing happenings. Based on these assumptions, we propose a new way of connecting pretend play and creativity: this time the focus will be on children’s exploratory and evaluative actions.
The creative pretend play: Exploration and evaluation
Children do not spend their make-believe time mainly on brainstorming various ideas—they also develop these ideas through action, narrative, thought, or imagination. They explore the remembered events in the actual surroundings. What is more, the pretending and exploring child evaluates her doings. That means that not every idea or not any action will be included within pretense, as this would result in chaos and would disable other players from following the make-believe plot. Some ideas seem to do better than others as they are in basic accordance with a certain playframe. Because of the exploratory and evaluative processes, the pretending child (as well as an adult creator) can actually be developing her initial ideas, staying within a certain situation or a playframe, and fine-tuning her actions—instead of behaving randomly or stopping at cumulating some odd ideas in the head.
What sparked us to study the exploratory and evaluative features of pretense is the so-called Geneplore model of creative processes—proposed and developed by Finke et al. (1992; Ward et al., 1999). According to the model, creative performances consist of two cognitive phases: an initial generation of ideas and subsequent extensive explorations, developments, and modifications of these ideas (hence: gene/plore). In other words, generation is about getting an idea, whereas exploration is about developing, evaluating, and elaborating on the idea or the emerging outcome. The Geneplore model assumes that a person can alternate between generative and exploratory processes, continuously refining the outcomes according to the demands and constraints of a particular situation. Hence, as it is shown here, creativity is not a one-step operation of generating new ideas in an all-of-a-sudden manner. It is a complex (and often complicated) process or activity in which, ultimately, some of the generated ideas are chosen because of their desirable qualities, such as being appropriate or useful in a particular context.
Stemming heavily from the tradition of cognitive science, the Geneplore model captures the mental processes that may be critical for creativity. It focuses on the workings of the “creative mind.” In our view, such a mentalist notion needs some important modifications. In contrast to Finke et al. (1992), we do not view creativity only through certain mental capacities because creative generation and exploration may be manifested in one’s actions as well (Carruthers, 2011; Glăveanu, 2013; Glăveanu et al., 2013). Indeed, it is one’s actions that bring creative outcomes to the world.
Consequently, talking about the exploratory and evaluative features of pretense, we will not only refer to the pretending child’s mind. Quite the opposite, we claim that pretense—at least in its early manifestations—is not so much about thinking ideas (in an all-of-a-sudden manner) but it is essentially about acting or performing some events or situations (that takes time). Additionally, we will not argue that pretend play is mainly about generating, exploring, and evaluating some ideas. Pretending children do not simply implement some mind-made ideas and some ready-made scripts or scenarios in their actions. They are rather world-sensitive, reacting to others, to the ongoing happenings and to their actual surroundings, using the given objects, as well as adjusting their behaviors to what-is and what-is-going-on (see Clark, 1997; Gibson, 1986; Rucińska, 2016, 2017; Szokolszky, 2006).
What is more, when we refer to generation and exploration in pretense, we mostly view them as some general types of activities of pretending children, or as some basic features of these activities. We do not actually label them as “phases”—as the authors of the Geneplore model did (Finke et al., 1992)—and certainly we do not want to treat them as two distinct phases or stages that happen in a sequential manner, one after another. Even though there is likely (but not necessarily) to be an initial idea or action generated that gives a spark to a certain pretense episode, further in the play the generative, the exploratory, and the evaluative activities overlap. Indeed, the generation of some new solutions may happen while children are already deeply immersed in a certain scenario. On the other hand, however, children’s extended exploration of a pretended situation may be enabled by some new ideas on how to further develop it.
Let us now successively present how these basic features of the creative processes, respectively—(a) exploration and (b) evaluation—might be manifested within children’s make-believe play. By means of such an analysis, we will show that pretense is the child’s creative action: one that is not only about thinking (or acting) divergently, but also about bringing in the outcomes that may be both original and valuable, at least from the perspective of the pretending child.
Exploration in pretense
Pretense itself could be seen as a form of exploration: as revealing and entertaining some possible reactions to a certain playframe. We propose that the pretending child may be exploring these possibilities through her maintained action, narrative, thought, or imagination. When we talk about maintenance here, we refer to an essential characteristic of exploration, which is, to be engaged with a certain issue for some time and to go over some of the possibilities that it gives. Substantially, children’s pretense is not a momentary action: it is usually being maintained and entertained until a range of possibilities within a pretended situation are unfolded (or until children become bored with their play). There is also a certain level of engagement in make-believe episodes—a kind of a playful flow to be observed there: children who are in the process of developing plots are not willing to be disrupted.
Now we see more clearly how generation—including divergent thinking—is different than exploration. The first is about getting an idea or many unrelated ideas, which may happen in a trice while the latter is all about maintenance and relatedness. We claim that the pretending child is essentially an exploring child. She is focused and engaged—at least for a short period of time—within a certain playframe. She is entertaining an event or situation in her continued action. She is developing a narration. She (being older) is also expanding a repertoire of thoughts and images connected with one issue, mentally uncovering the possibilities that it gives. Below, we will specifically show how all these exploratory features manifest when children pretend.
Maintained focus
To be focused is a basic condition for any exploration. Only children handling distractions can engage for a longer time with a specific object or event (Rothbart & Posner, 2001). Thus, the pretending child must be, to some extent, a focused child. On the other hand, the child is more impervious to distractions when he himself is engaged in pretend play with toys (Ruff & Capozzoli, 2003). As Vygotsky (1978) noticed: “Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse . . . I want to run off at once—this is perfectly clear—but the rules of the game order me to wait” (p. 99). Vygotsky claimed that the child would stay focused on play because following the plot gives him more pleasure than any immediate urge.
Defining focused attention as a sustained and active engagement with a stimulus, not only as mere looking or casual attention (Gaertner et al., 2008), we could easily assign it to pretending children. They are actively engaged in certain desirable actions which—to be performed—need to be maintained for some time. Even in the case of a simple “banana call”: the child “picks up” the banana, puts it to his ear, and then he might talk to the “phone” for a while, eventually “hanging it up” after the performed call. Such an engagement is even more apparent in social pretense. When children play in a group, joint attention is a necessity. For example, it is essential for all the kindergarteners performing “flying by plane” together, and “landing” in different places each by each, to share interest in the relevant “flight” situation the whole time it is being acted out. 3
As we have shown earlier, divergent thinking links with disparate attention. Possibly in those moments when pretending children do a kind of brainstorming, or when they search for different ideas to fill in the “slots” in the pretended scenario, or when another child (most probably the bored one) suddenly brings a surprising element into play—in all those moments, children’s attention may operate in a more defocused mode. Nevertheless, we argue that what constitutes any pretense episode is a maintained interest and an active engagement in an undertaken plot. With children focusing on whatever catches their eyes, there would be no play at all. There would be no fun but just a chaos of children’s disparate, unco-ordinated, and random reactions.
Maintained action and narrative
Pretending children are exploring possibilities in their actions. What does it specifically mean? First of all, it means they are engaged in evoking some situations by acting them out and embodying some of their possible plots according to their memory, their current needs, as well as to the actual happenings and to the given environmental and social context. Exploring situations in pretense is rehearsing them, actively checking them out, or searching for some of their potentialities. Thus, in a sense, children in their make-believe episodes are implicitly answering the question “What (else) can I do within this situation?” 4 Such an examination takes place partly because children’s knowledge about the events is not structured as well as adult’s knowledge. Children are just getting to know how to perform some actions and still investigating the possibilities that a certain situation can offer them.
Toddlers are mainly acting out some simple routines they have already experienced (Bretherton, 1989). For example, they are “drinking” from an empty cup or pretending to be asleep. Older children move on from recreating their own activities to taking on someone else’s behavior: they might be feeding their teddy bears and putting them to bed or “calling the police” using a TV remote. They may be also reflecting some popular media themes, pretending to be superheroes or singers. Importantly, all the pretense situations last for as long as all the possible plots desired by children are performed.
A make-believe situation can be also reinforced and explored through more or less extended narratives, 5 which are deployed in children’s play around 2 years of age (as they start talking) and that prevail and become more elaborated when children start engaging in a joint pretense (Benson, 1993). Pretending children can maintain a dialogue, develop the lines, respond to the expressions added by others, and probe the optional paths where the dialogues might possibly go. Harris (2000) claims that children engage in pretense much in the same way as adults process connected narratives: by developing chains of linked events and engaging in episodic structures.
According to many authors, pretending children’s actions and dialogues are heavily determined by scripts or event schemas (Nelson, 1986, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978), thus by some mental structures (or “meaningful wholes”) synthesized on the basis of their previous experiences (Donald, 1991; Mandler, 2004). That means that pretending children would be mostly externalizing their knowledge, embodying some ideas that are already “in there” in the form of mental scripts or scenarios. In a pretense episode, they would be unfolding a script step by step, according to their actual knowledge about the sequences of each situation. As Vygotsky (1978) stated: “[Play] is more memory in action than a novel imaginary situation” (p. 103). For example, while pretending to bake a birthday cake, the child would be subsequently entertaining all the elements of the “birthday cake baking” action scheme, which he already memorized (Nelson, 2007). In addition, Garvey (1990) indicated that pretending children know not only the typical actions of the impersonated characters, but they also recreate the lines or dialogues typical for them. For example, a boy pretending to be a “husband” says to a girl, his “wife”: “Okay, I’m all through with work, honey. I brought home a thousand dollars” (p. 88).
Describing pretense as a form of script-following does not, however, sound convincing to us. Pretending children are not fully determined by any scripts for they are sensitive to the ongoing play happenings and to the given surroundings. They perceive and respond to what-is and what-is-going-on, being improvisers rather than mere copycats. They react to objects and to others. In other words, children’s initial ideas, desires, and recollections of certain events become collated with what is actual. Therefore, some spontaneous optional paths for their actions and narratives may appear within play (Göncü, 1987). For example, there may be a sudden “shop robbery” within the “shopping in a store” episode. These out-of-script actions and dialogues may result from children’s current desires that are evoked within a pretense (e.g., when a scene is monotonous, the already bored child might need to change it). They may also be stemming from playing with the given objects and discovering some of their previously unnoticed possibilities for action (Rucińska, 2016; Szokolszky, 2006). Furthermore, the unexpected behavior or verbal expression of one child can lead others to follow yet another optional path in their joint pretense. All such spontaneous reactions give rise to children’s new behaviors and narratives, enabling further explorations of a situation being performed.
Maintained thought and imagination
For older children, make-believe situations can be explored by means of their thoughts or imagination, as exploratory processes in pretense (as well as in full-blown instances of creation) may be partly mental processes (Lillard, 2001). The older the child, the more imaginative and mind-dependent her pretense can be; she stops relying so heavily on her perception and external prompts to develop her play (Piaget, 1962). Even though talking about children’s mental explorations is largely a hypothetical endeavor, we want to undertake it with reference to the previous studies on counterfactual thinking of pretending children.
As Harris (2000) stated, “pretend play is an . . . initial exploration of the possible worlds” (p. 28). It seems that pretending involves entertaining and mentally exploring states of affairs that do not actually happen, and thinking or imagining what would be the case if they happened (Weisberg & Gopnik, 2013). 6 Pretending children appear to be occupied by or embodying certain alternative states of affairs like “this TV remote is a phone,” “this (empty) cup is filled with tea,” “I am a superhero,” or “this bed is a cosmic ship.” Stipulations like these are not true in reality, but they become binding in make-believe or possible worlds (Lewis, 1973). Such distinct make-believe worlds may be exactly the ones to be explored by means of imaginative or reasoning processes of children (but the older ones who are already cognitively capable of undertaking them, as we tend to think).
According to Weisberg and Gopnik (2013), three component abilities characterize both pretense and counterfactual thinking: first is disengaging with current reality and adopting a counterfactual premise; second is creating an event sequence and making inferences within the scenario, and the last is making a reality/fantasy distinction. We see the second step as the one of exploratory nature: one in which the child develops the hypothetical scenario, partly or entirely in her imagination. This also means that pretending children are exploring certain possibilities that may occur in the counterfactual world. For example, children that pretend to have a tea party—having presumably adopted the counterfactual premise “we are now having a cup of tea”—may then draw some inferences such as “so we drink it,” “so we can break the cup,” “so we talk about life,” and so forth. Interestingly, Lillard (2001) claims that pretense serves for children a similar function as the Twin Earth construct serves for philosophers: it enables them to imagine and explore an alternative world.
One prominent form of imaginative pretense is positing imaginary companions (Gleason, 2013; Taylor, 1999). Here, children are found to be engaging with an imaginary entity and exploring certain scenarios involving this entity over an extended period of time— it can take weeks, months, or even years for the child to have an imaginary friend around. This phenomenon can be expressed in different forms: the imaginary companion can be an invisible entity, granted only by the child’s imagination, or it can be instantiated through a certain object, like a teddy bear or a doll, into which the child projects a unique personality. Children may also be projecting another character’s personality into themselves (together with specific behaviors), pretending to be someone or something else for a prolonged period (Carlson & Taylor, 2005).
Evaluation in pretense
According to the standard definition of creativity (Runco & Jaeger, 2012), a product, a process, or an idea may be labeled as creative when it is found to be both novel and valuable. The value of a creative outcome might be identified in its appropriateness or utility (Runco, 2004)—in meeting certain conditions of a problem or a situation, or responding to some demands or desires of certain people. In yet other words, a creative product, process, or idea is an original one that fills in some important gaps (e.g., the technological, artistic, scientific, or cultural ones) or that responds to some actual needs. Therefore, a full-blown act of creativity does not only consist of generating and exploring ideas, or of initiating certain situations and revealing the possibilities hidden in them (what we described earlier), but it also consists of evaluating the outcomes. Could we now say that children’s pretense is creative in the full sense?
As Boden (2004) proposed, creativity can be recognized from a historical or psychological perspective. The “historical” creativity results in outcomes that are recognized as novel and valuable in a global way. The “psychological” creativity brings the outcomes that are new and valuable at least from the perspective of the person who produced them. Obviously, pretense is not the type of activity that globally changes some paradigms, or that leads to any inventions to be applied on a macroscale. Still, pretense is psychologically valuable, and—as we propose further—it is psychologically creative too. First, pretending children entertain and develop their make-believe scenarios, which are generally the situations experienced by them for the very first time. They also make their own novel and meaningful interpretations of what they previously observed or experienced (thus expressing a mini-c type of creativity, as described by Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007). Second, pretend play is an activity that relates to children’s actual desires and needs. Third, children guide their behaviors according to the demands of a specific playframe; they follow some rules and adjust their behaviors to certain conditions and some given constraints. They make their play valuable and meaningful themselves.
In the following paragraphs, we will indicate specifically how the processes of evaluation manifest in pretend play: what kind of appropriateness applies there, what are the other possible values toward which children guide their actions, what kinds of children’s desires and needs may be secured in pretense, and what types of constraints or conditions are to be met in pretend play. We propose that the evaluative processes to be found in pretense may be expressed implicitly and—for older children— they may be formulated in a more explicit and deliberate way.
Implicit evaluation in pretense
Not any random action will be undertaken by children in their pretense—it is not that anything would go in there. Some behaviors or lines of exploration seem to be more probable or appropriate than others. We suggest that children implicitly evaluate their make-believe play. First, they pick those real-world artifacts that resemble the pretended objects, that are approachable, or that best serve the desirable functions of them. Second, they perform those actions that are in basic accordance with a chosen playframe or storyline (e.g., it is better to be “drinking tea” than “shopping” while performing a “tea party”). Below, we will expand on these two suggestions.
Choosing and using objects in pretense
One of the first manifestations of pretend play is the so-called “object substitution,” where one object stands for another, for example, when a TV remote stands for a phone. What fascinates us here is children’s “method” of choosing the objects: not any random thing would stand for another thing. Namely, the chosen artifacts usually resemble the pretended objects perceptually (Picciuto & Carruthers, 2014), but they also have to be approachable or serve some of the desirable functions of the make-believe objects, as we see it. For example, children choose a TV remote to simulate a phone call not only because it has the cellphone’s shape and size (the classic “banana as a phone” pretense seems to be out-of-date: bananas do not resemble modern phones anymore), but also because it can be easily held in one hand and applied to one’s ear (for some reason, a “giant telephone” would not well serve the function of a make-believe phone). Also, children would cover a table with a blanket and pretend it is a house even if it does not resemble a real one as much—for their main desire may be to hide in such a “house.”
Already playing with an object, children use it in certain ways. Here—analogously to the “object choosing” cases—it is not that any random action would be undertaken with a particular thing at hand. In her approach to pretense, Rucińska (2017) uses the concept of “affordances” to show that the objects used by children (as well as the environment in which they play) have some specific dispositional properties and imply certain possibilities for playful actions. For example, a TV remote might afford “phoneness,” as it has appropriate dispositions to be like a phone. Some affordances are said to be more “canonical” than others for they invite specific actions more strongly (Costall, 2012). For example, because it is a canonical feature of cups to afford drinking from them, small children would likely use them in their “tea party” play; they would not go all crazy using the cups as hammers or chairs.
Once again, the artifacts used in pretense are not being chosen or used in an entirely random way. Even if a lot of objects can actually stand for a mobile phone—for example, a bar of chocolate, a small notebook, a calculator, a square plate, or even a toy car—a lot of things would still not fit in pretense because of their properties (a chair cannot be easily applied to the ear) or because of children’s actual desires and capacities. What is more, in the case of a joint pretense, using any random object or using it in any random way could confuse other children because they might not understand the whimsical choices of their play partners and, as a result, they could not continue their engagement in a make-believe plot. Children’s actions with objects need to be found comprehensible and meaningful by other pretenders.
Playframe and the inherent rules in pretense
A lot seems possible within a pretense—what is not feasible in the actual world seems feasible in there. The pretending child is willing to alter the standards and rules respected in reality: bananas become magic weapons, tables become cottages, and imaginary friends start wandering around. Altering the standards, children fulfill their needs or escape their parents’ safety prescriptions (e.g., pretending to iron the doll’s clothes). However, while a lot seems possible in pretense, it is not that there aren’t any rules in there and that simply anything might go.
First, there is a general pretense principle known as the “illusion conservation rule” (Giffin, 1984): not to mix the make-believe world with the real one. In other words, there is a certain playframe in which children would rather remain, not stepping away when it is already adopted. For example, when a banana serves as a magic weapon for Johnny (who uses it to protect Annie from monsters), he should rather not suddenly peel the banana and eat it. If the illusion conservation rule is violated, the whole fun of play is violated too. The same rule applies when we as adults are engaged in fiction through books, theatre, or cinema, and—while being immersed in the counterfactual stories—we do not want to be interrupted.
Essentially, there are certain rules to be followed within the make-believe plot itself—not any random idea or action will be accepted when children entertain a specific scenario. As we mentioned before: the make-believe world, similar to any counterfactual world, has its own truth (Currie, 1990; Lewis, 1973). Hence, children’s actions are somehow constrained by the rules of the make-believe world. For instance, when they are acting out the “visit to the dentist” event, they employ the probable or meaningful characteristics of such an event: a child-patient may be expected to sit calmly on the “dentist’s” chair with his mouth open. When children pretend that a room is a starship, they invoke the repertoire of behaviors and dialogues that are likely to happen to astronauts (which they might know from sci-fi movies or books): astronauts do not go shopping, do not catch butterflies, and they do not open the windows of their spacecraft. It is not welcomed to break the play rules as this would make the whole make-believe world collapse (unless the child finds justification for her strange behavior, adjusting it to the pretended situation, e.g., explaining that there are some “cosmic butterflies” to be caught up in the spaceship). Thus, children in play stay in basic accordance with the entertained plot. If they were behaving without any constraints (or thinking and acting in only a divergent way), no actual scenario could be developed by them.
We could also talk about some conventional or cultural standards that affect make-believe play. Vygotsky (1978) proposed that pretending children reenact the cultural conventions on how to carry out certain roles, for example, how to take care of a baby or how to behave in a coffeeshop. In his view, pretense is a developmental context in which the child externalizes in action and narration the shared cultural knowledge of how the world functions and how people behave. When pretending to have a tea party, children follow some rules of tea meetings, which they know from their early social interactions, like the one that a filled cup should be held with attention not to spill the drink around. They may be also pretending something fiction-based that they got to know from books or popular media. Still, there are certain standards that apply to such fiction-based pretense, like the rule that one should stay away from a monster because it is dangerous. According to Nelson (2007), pretending children express shared meanings. Because of this, everyone engaged in a play episode can actually understand what is happening and what is likely to happen. Finding a make-believe scenario meaningful and relatable, children can enjoy it and contribute to its development.
Explicit evaluation in pretense
Children between 3 and 5 years of age start overtly evaluating and influencing their play. Through her observational studies, Giffin (1981, 1984) showed that they do already employ some specific metacommunicative techniques that help them manage the make-believe episodes. For instance, she pointed to a children’s narrative device which she named “ulterior conversation,” which looks like acting but is an actual suggestion for a change in the ongoing plot. As an example, Giffin (1984) observed a bored child who asked the question, “Is it lunchtime?” to end playing school and give the play a new direction. She also identified “prompting” as another narrative method of play-managing in which one child overtly abandons his make-believe role so he can fix the mistakes of others and keep the plot going in an intended way. For example, one child, the prompter, whispered to another child: “You don’t talk like that, you say (with honeyed voice) ‘What’s the matter, mother’?” (pp. 81–88).
Thus, pretending children keep an eye on each other, explicitly evaluating the additions of other players so they will not break the basic storyline. Being inside a playframe, children are not only the actors (acting out the specific roles). They also become the playwrights who are cocreating the plot, as well as the stage managers who are engaged in distributing roles and props among themselves (Bretherton, 1989). Pretending children are the prompters as well, looking after each other and telling the others what is supposed to happen, so the main direction of the scenario can be continued without any corruptions.
In their middle childhood, children start deliberately employing rules that they themselves invented for their pretense. This comes with a general developmental achievement: to become relatively independent from the external props or circumstances and to rely more on internal processes, including imagination (Weisberg, 2015). Simultaneously, children around the age of 6 to 12 experience a growing sense of self: they see and guide their own impact on real-world events (Root-Bernstein, 2014). Hence, in their play, they not only recreate familiar situations and follow conventional rules, but they start being more inventive. They can be combining various norms and elements of certain events to form their very own and new ones.
This developmental tendency is most apparent when children engage in wordplays, or in building some micro make-believe worlds, known as paracosms. Worldplays are described as repeated evocations of some imaginary places or cultures, which are usually inhabited by imagined entities (Root-Bernstein, 2014). They may involve material documentation, which means that children often generate maps, drawings, stories, and other material artifacts to complement their paracosms. In their fullest form, imaginary worlds are persistent (lasting months or years), consistent (governed by the child’s sense of what is plausible and what is fantastic), and elaborative, therefore involving narrative development, scenario refinements, and system building. Importantly, worldplays consist of rules invented by the child; there may even be a new special language system generated for it. According to Singer and Singer (1990), this kind of pretense—being essentially self-chosen and self-directed—reflects a sense of personal control for the child. As Root-Bernstein (2014) concluded, “worldplay may contribute not only to the development of imagination, but also to the development of creative behaviors and a sense of self as a maker of meaning” (p. 417). In other words, the pretending children finally start to see themselves as creators. They also gradually learn to evaluate their creations in the specific terms of novelty and value.
Discussion
Above, we demonstrated how exploration and evaluation—these two important elements of full-blown creativity—are manifested in children’s pretend play. By these means, we complemented the previous studies that pointed to divergent thinking as the main pretense–creativity connector. Nevertheless, the central aim of our analysis was to show make-believe play as an action that is itself creative, at least to some basic extent. In our view, pretense encompasses the most fundamental creative processes and actions: the generative, the exploratory, and the evaluative ones. This is the area where ideas and behaviors are generated, developed, and evaluated, so that the outcomes may be both novel and valuable, at least from the perspective of the pretending child. Moreover, pretense may be viewed as genuinely creative, being an expression of a mini-c creativity. As Beghetto and Kaufman (2007) proposed, mini-c creativity consists of a “novel and personally meaningful interpretation of experiences, actions, and events” (p. 73). Children’s pretend performances involve such meaningful interpretations indeed.
Thinking about the possible future directions of our studies, we believe that the analysis of pretend play as a creative action can be interestingly developed and complemented from a sociocultural perspective. If pretending is defined as acting and reacting: exploring some situations in the given surroundings, as well as adjusting oneself to others and to the ongoing happenings, then—as we see it—it could be analyzed from at least three sociocultural viewpoints. First, in their active explorations of various situations, children reenact certain cultural conventions and knowledge of how these situations typically unfold, as Vygotsky (1978) and Nelson (2007) already stated. It would be valuable to thoroughly study these reenactments by observing, for example, exactly what elements children find meaningful in the specific social situations and what particular conventions they willingly interpret and develop in their own novel ways. Second, because an action of pretending takes place in some specific surroundings that are culturally shaped and filled with culturally valid objects, we would find interesting the analysis of the extent to which children modify the so-called “canonical” functions of certain artifacts (see Costall, 2012). Last but not least, pretending itself is very much a social and relational activity in which children constantly fine-tune their reactions to others and to the actual intersubjective contexts. Studying it as such is an important endeavor—all the more so because the challenge of dealing with others (i.e., not only with some ideas or objects) has, in our view, a largely creative potential. Indeed, creativity mostly happens somewhere in-between.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the team of the Early Cognitive Development Centre in the University of Queensland (Australia), especially Nicole Nelson, Mark Nielsen, Thomas Suddendorf, as well as Bill von Hippel, Adam Bulley, Frankie Fong, Shalini Gautam, Karri Neldner, Jonathan Redshaw, Melina West and Matti Wilks for sharing their ideas and commenting on the first versions of this paper. We also greatly thank Zuzanna Rucińska from the Centre for Philosophical Psychology in the University of Antwerp for her helpful suggestions and support of this research.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland (grant number 2016/21/N/HS1/03495).
