Discusses the relationship between play and creativity and reviews research studies that suggest that play does facilitate creativity and studies that have found relations between affective processes in play and creativity. Outlines directions for future research into play and creativity. (SLD)

Presents an interview with Eliana Gil, the current director of the Starbright Training Institute for child abuse and neglect, play therapy, and family play therapy in Springfield, Virginia. Gil's publications and experiences have spoken to coconstructing family therapy sessions that effectively integrate the paradigms of play and family therapy.…

This commentary on the research reported in this monograph stresses the importance of the analogy between the processes involved in pretense comprehension and the processes required to comprehend written or spoken text. The commentary also raises the concern that children could perform correctly on pretense problems using processes of text…

This response to the commentary on the research reported in this monograph discusses children's understanding of pretending adults' attitudes to pretend situations; the effect of the distinction between fictional and instructional texts on interpreting children's understanding of pretense, when pretense comprehension is seen as analogous to text…

Experimental research into the symbolic play of children with autism is reviewed in an attempt to outline the nature of their deficit in this area. Evidence is found for an impairment in the spontaneous symbolic play of autistic children, but autistic children may have a capacity for symbolic play that they do not spontaneously exhibit.…

Presents an inventory of the reading- and writing-like behaviors of eight preschoolers as demonstrated in their pretend play episodes. Represents one set of findings from an ethnographic study which explored the nature of literate behavior in pretend play. Describes specific data analysis techniques used to construct the inventory and provides…

Summarizes the autonomous literacy paradigm often used in schools. Describes an alternative model, ideological literacy, which situates literacy practices within cultural values and practices. Shows how this functioned in a class of 4.5 to 5.5 year-olds, in which children's world of play was linked to the wider world and in which literacy had an…

Two studies examined the memory of three- and four-year olds for identity of an object that they used in a previous episode of pretend play or that they observed someone else using. Found that more children correctly remembered the true than the pretend identity of the objects. (MDM)

This study investigated the relationship between the social and play behaviors of young children with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) and without PDD. Videotaped observations of 21 preschool children (12 with PDD and 9 without PDD) were examined independently for (a) social complexity and (b) play complexity that was assessed on an…

We addressed the question of whether mothers of conduct-problem (CP) children differ from mothers of non-CP children in their awareness and coaching of emotion, and also examined whether mother's awareness and coaching of emotion is associated with better peer relations in CP children. Meta-emotion philosophy, assessed through audio taped…

There are many age-appropriate, free, and easy-to-use online games available on the Web. In this column the authors describe some of their favorites for use with and by elementary students. They have not included games that require children to log on and/or register with their names or play against someone else interactively over the Web. None of…

Although recent evidence has shown that conversational contexts may be more effective in achieving spontaneous use of language targets, many clinicians continue to employ more structured and less naturalistic contexts for their therapy. The purpose of the current article is to present a therapy approach that is structured, yet incorporates the…

In this article, the author invokes Michel Foucault's analysis of panopticism to understand the performance of mothering in the suburban playground. The mothers in the ring of park benches symbolize the suggestion of surveillance, which Foucault describes as the technology of disciplinary power under liberal ideals of governance. However, the…

Two studies were carried out in an attempt to replicate an earlier but controversial set of findings that suggested that young children are able to understand pretence in a mentalistic sense (Hickling, Wellman, & Gottfried, 1997). In Study 1, 65 three-year-olds and 77 four-year-olds were asked to either judge the thoughts of an absent teddy bear,…