Resources

What We Know About Play:
A Walk through the Selected Research

- An easy-to-read summary of some of the major themes relating to play through age three-including a description of the Touchpoints Model in the appendix-can be found in The Irreducible Needs of Children: What Every Child Must Have to Grow, Learn, and Flourish by pediatrician T. Barry Brazelton and child psychiatrist Stanley L. Greenspan.

How and why play helps to shape kids
While there has been significant documentation on the fact that play does indeed shape the physical, cognitive, sensory, social, and emotional development of children, there is less understanding of exactly what it is in the play activity and interchange that creates the impact.

According to Professor Doris Bergen of Miami University of Ohio, speaking at the March 2000 Playing for Keeps national conference at Wheelock College in Boston, a new wave of research questions is now capturing the attention of scholars-research that looks "more precisely at the meanings of play for children, cognitive processes such as children's theory of mind, educational processes such as language/literacy development, and sociocultural meanings imbedded in play of children of diverse cultures The relationship of play to brain development, personality differences in playfulness, and the adaptive nature of play in human evolution are also of current interest to researchers, as is the influence of technology."