I may be reinventing a known thing in child development or psychology here, but bear with me.
The simplest games I see babies play — games simple enough that cats and dogs can play them too — are what I’d call “circle games.”
Think of the game of “fetch”. I throw the ball, Rover runs and brings it back, and then we repeat, ad infinitum. (Or, the baby version: baby throws the item out of the stroller, I pick it up, and then we repeat.)
Or, “peek-a-boo.” I hide, I re-emerge, baby laughs, repeat.
My son is also fond of “open the door, close the door, repeat”, or “open the drawer, close the drawer, repeat”, which are solo circle games, and “together/apart”, where he pushes my hands together and apart and repeats, and of course being picked up and put down repeatedly.
A lot of toys are effectively solo circle games in physical form. The jack-in-the-box: “push a button, out pops something! close the box, start again.” Fidget toys with buttons and switches to flip: “push the button, get a satisfying click, repeat.”
It’s obvious, observing a small child, that the purpose of these “games” is learning. And, in particular, learning cause and effect. What do you learn by opening and closing a door? Why, how to open and close doors; or, phrased a different way, “when I pull the door this way, it opens; when I push it that way, it closes.” Playing fetch or catch teaches you about how objects move when dropped or thrown. Playing with button-pushing or latch-turning toys teaches you how to handle the buttons, keys, switches, and handles that are ubiquitous in our built environment.
But what about peek-a-boo? What are you “learning” from that? (It’s a myth that babies enjoy it because they don’t have object permanence; babies get object permanence by 3 months, but enjoy peek-a-boo long after that.) My guess is that peek-a-boo trains something like “when I make eye contact I get smiles and positive attention” or “grownups go away and then come back and are happy to see me.” It’s social learning.
It’s important for children to learn, generally, “when I act, the people around me react.” This gives them social efficacy (“I can achieve goals through interaction with other people”), access to social incentives (“people respond positively when I do this, and negatively when I do that”), and a sense of social significance (“people care enough about me to respond to my actions.”) Attachment psychology argues that when babies and toddlers don’t have any adults around who respond to their behavior, their social development goes awry — neglected children can be extremely fearful, aggressive, or checked-out, missing basic abilities in interacting positively with others.
It’s clear just from observation that the social game of interaction — “I make a sound, you make a sound back” — is learned before verbal speech. Preverbal babies can even execute quite sophisticated interaction patterns, like making the tonal pattern of a question followed by an answering statement. This too is a circle game.
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