The Science of Everyday Play

Developmental scientists consider play to be essential to learning. Play is a ubiquitous activity of childhood in every community across the globe. It cuts across every domain of development—cognition, perception, motor action, social interaction, language, emotion, and gender. Before children begin formal schooling, play occupies nearly all of their waking day: In Piaget’s words, “play is the work of children.” The science of everyday play, therefore, provides a uniquely informative window into patterns of typical and atypical learning and development and how children’s social interactions and home environments support or impede learning. This dataset constitutes the first large-scale, systematic investigation of children’s play in the natural home setting. We conducted the first comprehensive in-depth study of infants’ everyday play (ages 13, 18, and 23 months) and caregiver interactions in the natural context of the home. The project includes a corpus of 234 hours of video recording (across 2 days, 2 hours per visit) of infants and mothers going about their daily routines. We video coded foundational passes on infant object play, motor play, and language behaviours, thereby producing rich descriptive data on how infants play, how play changes across the course of a day and the second year, and which environmental and social factors support infant play. This project yields several valuable products that are disseminated to and shared with the scientific community, parents, and other stakeholders.