ABSTRACT
Background: Today's common typologies and categories of children's toys are mainly decided by the manufacturers and retailers of children's products. Such categorizations are not based on a theoretical understanding of child development and therefore cannot provide information about the opportunities that toys provide for the young. Objective: This study proposed three criteria for categorizing toys based on the cultural-historical approach: their degree of realism; their degree of anthropomorphism; and their degree of detail. These criteria were chosen as a result of an analysis of theoretical works carried out in the framework of cultural-historical approach. Design: The proposed criteria were tested through an experiment measuring children's toy preferences. The participants were 129 children of ages 3-4 years. Experimental data confirmed that most children do prefer realistic and detailed toys rather than those with fewer of these properties. The contribution of socio-demographic factors and the children's individual developmental indicators to their toy preference was also analyzed. Results: The study revealed that among various socio-demographic factors, only the child's gender and the number of siblings in the family acted as significant predictors for the toy preferences. None of child's developmental characteristics (nonverbal intelligence, executive functions, and emotional understanding) were found to be significant predictors of preference for particular toys. Conclusions: The assumption that toys can be assessed in terms of their realism and degree of detail found empirical support. The results of this study may be useful in designing further research and in the practical issue of toy selection for children age 3-4 years.
ABSTRACT
Role-play in early childhood is associated with development of executive functions (EFs), although study results remain inconsistent. Due to the complex nature of the role-play, the underlying mechanisms of these associations are not obvious. In this article, play is viewed in the framework of the cultural-historical approach as a special social situation that can become the social situation of development if it results in dramatic perezhivanie of a child. In this study, we compared the level of EFs and play behavior between two play contexts: play guided by an adult and one with less adult involvement. Play behavior was analyzed based on five behavioral measures suggested to be the markers of dramatic perezhivanie. Measures of EFs were taken before and after the experimental procedure. Results show that dramatic perezhivanie might be considered a driver of EFs development through role-play in early childhood. As well as this, the involvement of an adult into play was associated with different patterns of EFs dynamics before and after the intervention. Future work can investigate if the construct of dramatic perezhivanie, microsocial situation of development, and micro-crisis might explain variability of the study results on the association between the role-play and child development.
