Excerpt from Me, Myself and I
Think about it. Play helps children understand that things can stand for other things – that keys or shoes can stand for “Daddy,” that her purse or lipstick can stand for “Mommy,” that a leash or collar can stand for “dog.” It is quite amazing, really, because there is no way we can ever achieve that for our kids. They simply have to sort it out on their own.
How? As a child rummages through the bottom of the closet and pulls out a familiar pair of big, old shoes, someone who takes notice in the sequence of the child’s play will say the word “Daddy,” and probably more than once. The child plays (with pleasure) as she pairs them up, hefts her weight, maybe even struggles to put on those size 12s. And the “power” word she hears in this whole scenario is “Daddy.” After the memory and pleasure centers in the brain connect with the word heard for this experience, the experience gets filed (pleasantly) under “Daddy” or “shoes” or “smelly feet” – probably all three.
But more importantly, the experience gets remembered (learned), and soon the play starts to symbolize the child’s experience with any or all of the parts of this scene. Which experience is hard to predict, be it remembering her father when he is gone, classifying pairs of things that belong together, or the raw joy of exploring. But the experience now has some kind of symbol connected to it, thanks to play.
Moreover, experience gets symbolized and images fixed through play in a way that the child can create new symbols over time. He combines and reshapes old ones, or uses them in novel ways. This capacity to manipulate and change them gives him wonderful new tools for elaborating his own experience and understanding of the world and his place in it. This remarkable capacity it what we call “imagination.”
