The Discovery of Children's Play

Abstract

Primarily, children's play is part of the larger investigation of play and to which Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have made their notable contributions. Huizinga's model attempts to explain the relationship between play and by enumerating five characteristics of play. Play is voluntary, it is distinct from ordinary life, it takes place within limited temporal and spatial boundaries, it creates order, and it tends to create permanent social groupings. Huizinga goes so far as to state that, culture arises in the form of and although Caillois avoids this conclusion, he agrees that play and are analogous.' Because Huizinga's work emphasizes the competitive aspects of play, Caillois feels it is incomplete and argues the importance of games of chance, mimicry, and vertigo. Neither one is concerned specifically with children's play, but both believe that the freedom of childhood is expressed in pleasure derived from play. Their identification of pleasure with freedom raises an issue which lies at the heart of current debates on the use of leisure time: are work and play antithetic? Huizinga wrote at a time when the recreation specialists were turning play into work. Moreover, culture, for Huizinga, was a fixed, stable, preexisting element, a standard by which to judge play.2 Recent statements by anthropologists minimize the distinctions between and play by defining play as a process rather than a specific activity.3 Play from this perspective is a way of organizing behavior and any activity can be played. The distinctions between the play of children and adults are also eliminated. The object of the study of children's play thus becomes not the origins of culture, but the socialization process by which the child learns to play as an adult.