Importance of Child Play Essay Example
For my term paper I chose to search on any research involving child play and its importance in understanding children’s emotions and behaviors. This topic interests me because I have noticed that most of the mothers I know don’t supervise their children at play. Usually that’s because they are busy with careers and house work. I believe observing children at play could offer caregivers insight into what that child is thinking or feeling.
I was able to find four peer reviewed articles that focused on children’s play narratives to examine different hypothesis. The first article is titled Internal Representations: Predicting Anxiety From Children’s Play Narratives by Susan L. Warren, Robert N. Emde, and Alan Sroufe. It is an article from the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The objective if this qualitative longitudinal study was to see whether “the internal representations as measured by narratives at 5 years of age would predict internalizing and anxiety symptoms at 6 years of age” (Warren, et al., 2000). Their sample consisted of fifty-one subjects, twenty-five were male and twenty-six female. It was a non clinical volunteer sample which they obtained by contacting mothers through the office of vital statistics. All the mothers who were sought had a high school diploma and had given birth to a full-term child with no pregnancy or delivery complications. Before the children were three years old several mothers were contacted and eighty-five percent declined due to time constraints. Of the sample size only one family was African-American, one Hispanic, and one Asian-American, the rest were white Americans. When the children reached age five all participants remained. “At age 6, however, only 35 subjects remained because the 6 year old visit had not been part of the original contract, and many parents said they were too busy to participate” (Warren, et al. 2000). These children were seen from age three to six. The procedure for
I was able to find four peer reviewed articles that focused on children’s play narratives to examine different hypothesis. The first article is titled Internal Representations: Predicting Anxiety From Children’s Play Narratives by Susan L. Warren, Robert N. Emde, and Alan Sroufe. It is an article from the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The objective if this qualitative longitudinal study was to see whether “the internal representations as measured by narratives at 5 years of age would predict internalizing and anxiety symptoms at 6 years of age” (Warren, et al., 2000). Their sample consisted of fifty-one subjects, twenty-five were male and twenty-six female. It was a non clinical volunteer sample which they obtained by contacting mothers through the office of vital statistics. All the mothers who were sought had a high school diploma and had given birth to a full-term child with no pregnancy or delivery complications. Before the children were three years old several mothers were contacted and eighty-five percent declined due to time constraints. Of the sample size only one family was African-American, one Hispanic, and one Asian-American, the rest were white Americans. When the children reached age five all participants remained. “At age 6, however, only 35 subjects remained because the 6 year old visit had not been part of the original contract, and many parents said they were too busy to participate” (Warren, et al. 2000). These children were seen from age three to six. The procedure for