Preschoolers’ free play - connections with emotional and social functioning

Play has an important role in various aspects of children’s development. However, time for free play has declined substantially over the last decades. To date, few studies have focused on the relationship between opportunities for free play and children’s social functioning. The aims of this study are to examine whether children ́s free play is related to their social functioning and whether this relationship is mediated by children ́s emotional functioning. Seventy-eight children (age, 55- 77 months) were tested on their theory of mind and emotion understanding. Parents reported on their children’s time for free play, empathic abilities, social competence and externalizing behaviors. The main findings showed that free play and children’s theory of mind are negatively related to externalizing behaviors. Empathy was strongly related to children’s social competence, but free play and social competence were not associated. Less time for free play is related to more disruptive behaviors in preschool children, however certain emotional functioning skills influence these behaviors independently of the time children have for free play. These outcomes suggest that free play might help to prevent the development of disruptive behaviors, but future studies should further examine the causality of this relationship.

Into the looking glass: Literacy acquisition and mirror invariance in preschool and first-grade children

At what point in reading development does literacy impact object recognition and orientation processing? Is it specific to mirror images? To answer these questions, forty-six 5- to 7-year-old preschoolers and first graders performed two same–different tasks differing in the matching criterion-orientation-based versus shape-based (orientation independent)-on geometric shapes and letters. On orientation-based judgments, first graders out- performed preschoolers who had the strongest difficulty with mirrored pairs. On shape-based judgments, first graders were slower for mirrored than identical pairs, and even slower than preschoolers. This mirror cost emerged with letter knowledge. Only first graders presented worse shape-based judgments for mirrored and rotated pairs of reversible (e.g., b-d; b-q) than nonreversible (e.g., e-ә) letters, indicating readers’ difficulty in ignoring orientation contrasts relevant to letters.