TY - JOUR
T1 - Infant exuberant object play at home
T2 - Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice
AU - Herzberg, Orit
AU - Fletcher, Katelyn K.
AU - Schatz, Jacob L.
AU - Adolph, Karen E.
AU - Tamis-LeMonda, Catherine S.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Child Development © 2021 Society for Research in Child Development.
PY - 2022/1/1
Y1 - 2022/1/1
N2 - Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75% White). Regardless of age, for every infant and time scale, across 10,015 object bouts, object interactions were short (median = 9.8 s) and varied (transitions among dozens of toys and non-toys) but consumed most of infants’ time. We suggest that infant exuberant object play—immense amounts of brief, time-distributed, variable interactions with objects—may be conducive to learning object properties and functions, motor skill acquisition, and growth in cognitive, social, and language domains.
AB - Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75% White). Regardless of age, for every infant and time scale, across 10,015 object bouts, object interactions were short (median = 9.8 s) and varied (transitions among dozens of toys and non-toys) but consumed most of infants’ time. We suggest that infant exuberant object play—immense amounts of brief, time-distributed, variable interactions with objects—may be conducive to learning object properties and functions, motor skill acquisition, and growth in cognitive, social, and language domains.
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U2 - 10.1111/cdev.13669
DO - 10.1111/cdev.13669
M3 - Article
C2 - 34515994
AN - SCOPUS:85114879358
SN - 0009-3920
VL - 93
SP - 150
EP - 164
JO - Child development
JF - Child development
IS - 1
ER -