Psychoethological perspective on play: implications for research and practice

Abstract

This study focuses on play from a psychoethological perspective and examines the implications for research and practice. Over the past decades, children are provided with more educational opportunities and more access to adult-led activities, albeit suffering a severe lack of self-directed play. This fact is worrying when we consider the indications in animal models that self-directed play is important for the development of the social brain and emotional self-regulation. This essay represents an invitation-justification for children to recover opportunities for natural play, of which they have been deprived. The more we know about play, the more suitable the opportunities we can offer them will be. We need to conduct further research on this topic, in an intellectual environment that enables collaboration between ethologists, psychologists, educators, and neuroscientists, promoting a bidirectional interaction between theory and practice.

Keywords:
playing; social brain; development; emotion; nature