One of the first things many parents of autistic children hear is that their child “needs to work on pretend play.” Sometimes it can feel like pretend play is treated as a milestone that predicts ...

Researchers say there is evidence infants are exploring the world of make-believe before they're even aware they are doing it. A new study exploring the origins of pretend play suggests infants ...

From developing social skills to fostering creativity, pretend play in young children is likened to being a "metaphoric multivitamin" in an editorial published in the journal Neuroscience and ...

“Let’s pretend to be…” is commonly heard from young children as they play and interact at school, daycare, or at home. Many adults encourage imagination and creativity but others are afraid that ...

Many people often think of play in the form of images of young children at recess engaging in games of tag, ball, using slides, swings, and physically exploring their environments. But physical play ...

Julia Wolf analyzes the importance of pretend play for exploring the development of social cognition. The ability to adopt another person’s perspective is important for social cognition and, ...

Children are incorporating Covid-19 into pretend play. By Paul L. Underwood Last month, I popped into one of my favorite local restaurants. The place is known for its eccentric menu, created daily ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Although Kanzi, who died in March 2025, did not initiate the pretend play, his ability to follow along shows he had some of the ...

Pretend play is associated with a host of enhanced cognitive abilities such as executive function, language and perspective taking, which are important to education, making the minimization of pretend ...

A new study exploring the origins of pretend play suggests infants perform interactional patterns with elements of pretense a lot earlier than thought. Pretend play is often considered a developmental ...