Imaginative Play and Storytelling: Why Pretending Matters

A cardboard box becomes a boat. A wooden spoon becomes a microphone. A child who has been told to tidy up announces, very seriously, that they cannot, because the floor is lava.

Pretend play can look like a pleasant way to pass time before the proper learning starts. I see it differently. When children pretend, they are practising some of the hardest things we ask of them later: holding an idea in mind, using words precisely, and imagining what someone else might think or feel.

What happens when children pretend

Lev Vygotsky, writing in the 1930s, argued that in play a child behaves “beyond his average age, above his daily behavior”, as if “a head taller than himself”. His point was that pretending comes with rules. A child playing at being a shopkeeper has to act like a shopkeeper, which means resisting the urge to do something else. A stick standing in for a horse also asks the child to separate an object from its meaning, an early step towards symbols, letters and numbers.

Pretend play is also full of talk. Children negotiate roles (“You be the baby”), plan (“Let’s pretend the bridge broke”), and narrate (“And then the dragon flew away”). This kind of language goes beyond labelling what is in front of them. It refers to things that are not there and events that have not happened, which is exactly the language that stories and, later, school texts demand.

What the research does and does not show

It is easy to overclaim here. In 2013, Angeline Lillard and colleagues published a large review in Psychological Bulletin looking at whether pretend play causes improvements in areas such as language, creativity, problem-solving and understanding others. They found plenty of studies showing links between pretend play and these skills, but much weaker evidence that the play itself was the cause. Some studies had design problems, and some well-known findings had not been replicated.

That does not mean pretend play is unimportant. It means the honest message is more modest: pretend play is one of several good routes to language and social understanding, and it seems to work best when it is rich in talk and, at times, shared with an interested adult.

Stories have a related line of research. Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley (2008) argued that fiction works as a kind of simulation of social life, letting readers practise taking other people’s perspectives. A 2018 meta-analysis by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir found that reading fiction had a small positive effect on social understanding. Some well-publicised single studies in this area have not held up when other researchers repeated them, so “small” is the word to remember.

Shared stories at home

Reading together is one of the most useful habits a family can have, and how you read matters as well as how often. Grover Whitehurst and colleagues (1988) developed an approach called dialogic reading, where the adult asks open questions and lets the child become the storyteller over time. Their study with young children found gains in expressive language compared with ordinary reading.

In practice, that looks like:

• pausing to ask “What do you think will happen?” or “Why is he sad?”
• adding a little to what the child says (“Yes, a dog. A big, muddy dog.”)
• letting the child retell a familiar book in their own words, even if the plot wanders

Told stories count too. Family stories, made-up bedtime tales and stories in a home language all build the same skills. For families who speak more than one language, telling stories in the language you are most comfortable in is a good choice.

Joining in without taking over

Children usually get the most from pretend play when they lead it. Adults can help by:

• providing open-ended things such as boxes, fabric, cups, toy animals and small figures
• taking a role when invited, and following the child’s storyline rather than steering it
• adding a small twist when play gets stuck (“Oh no, the shop has run out of bread!”)
• leaving time. Rich pretend play often takes a while to get going and is hard to fit into ten minutes.

For many children, unhurried free time at home and in nursery is where this kind of play happens, which is one reason I value it so much. Play Is Learning: Why Unstructured Play Matters goes into this further.

A note on children who play differently

Some children, including some autistic children, may pretend less, pretend in different ways, or prefer to line up and sort toys. That is not a problem to fix. Notice what your child enjoys, join them there, and build from it. If you have wider concerns about your child’s language or social communication, talk to your health visitor, GP or the setting’s SENCO, and see Language Development Milestones from 0 to 5 for a general guide.

Further reading

• Lillard, A. S. et al. (2013). The impact of pretend play on children’s development: a review of the evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1-34.
• Mar, R. A. and Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173-192.
• Dodell-Feder, D. and Tamir, D. I. (2018). Fiction reading has a small positive impact on social cognition: a meta-analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(11), 1713-1727.
• Vygotsky, L. S. (1967). Play and its role in the mental development of the child. Soviet Psychology, 5(3), 6-18.
• Whitehurst, G. J. et al. (1988). Accelerating language development through picture book reading. Developmental Psychology, 24(4), 552-559.

Cover image: Photo by Jovan Vasiljević on Unsplash.