C h i l d h o o d P l a y as an A n a l o g to A d u l t C a p a c i t y to W o r k

Nancy S. Cotton, PhD

Harvard Medical School

A B S T R A C T : This paper presents a theoretical model that proposes the continuity between childhood play and adult work. A developmental perspective is used to describe the complex transformations that take place turning an infant's behavior into adult work. Four childhood analogs to adult work are described. The thesis of the paper is that childhood play is the major arena in which these analogs develop. The arena of play can be characterized by four characteristics that facilitate the development of the analogs to adult work: (1) play provides the opportunity for children to learn, develop, and perfect new skills that build competence; (2) play is t h e child's natural mode to master anxiety from overwhelming experiences of everyday life, which builds the capacity to cope with the environment; (3) play helps build the ego's capacity to mediate between unconscious and conscious realities, which enhances ego strength; and (4) play repeats or confirms a gratifying experience that fuels a child's i n v e s t m e n t in life.

The developmental perspective assumes that there is continuity between the activities of childhood and adult functioning. Longitudinal studies of behavior, attitudes, and personality show that capacities and structures at later developmentaI stages are closely related to, but often different from, the behaviors of earlier less mature stages. Using this developmental perspective, this paper will outline a child's analogs to adult work capacity. The thesis of this paper is that childhood play is the major arena in which these analogs develop. The arena will be described generally and four specific characteristics of play will be elaborated that lead into four childhood analogs of adult work capacity.
Nancy S. Cotton is Instructor in Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Director of Child Psychiatry Inpatient Service, New England Memorial Hospital, Stoneham, Massachusetts. A revised version of a paper presented at the Symposium: Work and Development, held during the 1980 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, San Francisco, California.
Child Psychiatry and Human Development, VoL 14(,3), Spring 1984 9 1984 Human Sciences Press
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The Arena of Play

The arena of play initially includes all of childhood activities. There is an intrinsic pleasure in activity which motivates a child's act i o n - w h e n a child does something for the sake of doing it. 1 With development a gradual differentiation of childhood action occurs, resulting in behaviors that are more clearly labeled as play and work in adults. The distinction between work and play is an adult conception. It is only with maturation and development that the child begins to make this distinction. For example: Last summer, friends of ours asked their four-year-old child to summarize what he liked most about his weeklong vacation with us on Martha's Vineyard. He replied, "Doing the laundry with Paul," which he had done daily, sometimes opting for the laundry in lieu of the beach. The distinction between work and play is made by the child when he enters school. The differentiation of the child's life into school activities and after-school activities represents the first childhood representation of play. Concrete operational thought selects concrete criteria for this distinction during this developmental period. People have questioned whether children work; however, no one questions whether children play. Erikson has described childhood play as the child's work. ~ Rather than debating whether children work or play, it is more useful to consider play the "child's characteristic mode of behavior ''3 and to look for the "work" within the play. Plaut has defined adult work as "activity producing something useful or valuable--in terms of goods or services. ''4 In this sense children work: Infants try endlessly to open kitchen cabinets; toddlers put things in things, make sand castles, and tear paper; young children fix toy trucks, bake imaginary cakes, and care for baby dolls; latency age children learn to read, play musical instruments, rake leaves, bring out the trash, and on and on. Work has also been defined as "serious activity in which the individual feels responsible for the end product. ''4 Have you ever been with an infant who is trying to reach a cookie, or a toddler building a tower of blocks? There is no doubt that these people are serious, feel responsible for their actions, and are "preoccupied with the end product." As children mature and develop, they begin to distinguish and label aspects of their activities as either play or work. For the preschool child, work is associated with the world of adults and play is what

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children do in their world. Children at this age want to "work" as revealed in their play, which consists of vivid imitations of adult mannerisms, abilities, and roles and identifications with adult characteristics of beauty, strength, and power. They also "play" with toys, swing on swings and watch television. Thus, the preschooler's distinction between work and play appears to revolve around their subjective perception of adult status and reality. The latency age child associates work with school, doing required chores, or performing the unpleasant or coerced part of any activity. He plays baseball and fantasy games while he works at learning to read or cleaning up his room. Adult work of all kinds results from the complex transformation of what starts with an infant's playful, exploratory, and manipulative behavior. Erikson describes the transformation of play into work as the process by which the "spheres of play and games increasingly reach into the arena of responsible and irreversible action." 5 If all goes well, an element of "playfulness" remains in both work and play throughout the life cycle. "Playfulness" adds the "joy of self-expression" to the play and work of children and adults. ~ The arena of play can be described in terms of four specific characteristics of playing. These characteristics are complex processes: 1. Play provides the opportunity for children to learn, develop, and perfect new skills. 2. Play is the child's natural mode to master anxiety from overwhelming experiences and to negotiate stress from the demands of everyday life. 3. Play helps build the ego's capacity to mediate between unconscious and conscious realities. 4. Play repeats or confirms a gratifying experience; play is fun.

Analogs of Adult Capacity to Work

Each play characteristic builds skills and attitudes that constitute a childhood analog of adult work. The four analogs are (1) competence, which emerges out of the opportunity provided by play to build skills; (2) capacity to cope with the environment, which relates to the management of anxiety learned in play; (3) ego strength, which is enhanced by the relationship of play to reality; and (4) investment in life, which develops through the child's enjoyment of play.

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Competence
First, a child develops a competence through play. "Functional theories" of play emphasize that in playing children learn and grow by maintaining an active interaction with the physical and social environment. Individual skills are discovered, developed, and perfected. Piaget's work describes the central role of play in the development of intelligence. 6 He describes how the child moves to increasingly sophisticated levels of thought from his continued exploration, manipulation, and experimentation with the objects around him. The child is learning what he can do and expanding his repertoire of competencies. He is also learning about what is "workable in the structure of things and in the nature of basic materials." 5 Different types of play relate to nearly all types of skills required in adult functioning. Exercise of motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities leads to competence in these areas. In addition, play with peers becomes the arena for learning interpersonal skills and developing social competence. In peer play the child at each age prepares for adult social interaction. Preschool children play house, war, hospital, marriage, and even school. If you listen to and observe this play, you will hear the participant debating the "right" and "wrong" ways to do various tasks, perform roles, or even dress a part. There is an unnerving accuracy in their imitations and usually an amusing creativity in their adaptations of adult life. In latency the child develops and extends his competence into the real world. Fantasy provides a private world for experimentation; the child also needs to master the real world and its demands. The child moves from play that imagines the self in the "imaginary adult and baby world" to being a self in a real child world. Fantasies of being a famous scientist must be complemented by good grades in school; of being the star Red Sox pitcher by making little league; of being a fashion model by appropriate dress and grooming; of being a popular movie star by a circle of friends who come to play with you after school. According to Erikson, "competence" is one of the virtues developed in childhood which "characterizes what eventually becomes workmanship . . . . ,, 7 Assuming a "cumulative theory of development," one can propose that competence in childhood tasks will lead to "benign cycles" of developmental progressS--success breeds success.

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Capacity to Cope
In the second childhood analog, playing relates to the child's capacity to cope. Anna Freud considers the capacity to cope one of the principal characteristics of mental health in childhood.9 The capacity to regulate and tolerate levels of anxiety through active coping allows the child to master danger situations and to "dispense with excessive defense activity, compromise formations, and symptomatology. ''9 "Traumatic theories" of play describe the management of anxiety through fantasy play. This anxiety can result from three sources: the overwhelming or traumatic experiences of the past, emotional difficulties relating to current stress, or the anticipated conflicts and troubles of the future. Clinical descriptions of childhood play have described this process and play therapy is based on this principle. Play provides the child with a trial universe 7 in which fantasy play allows for the "gradual assimilation of anxiety . . . . ,,10 To quote Freud's description11: It is certain that children behave in this fashion toward every distressing impression they receive, that is by reproducing it in their play. In this changing from passivity to activity they attempt to master their experience psychically. In her 1935 s t u d y of children's imagination, Griffiths concluded that " f a n t a s y is the manner of thinking natural in childhood. 3'' The child builds a symbolic framework around the physical world. The t o y world of play is a world of displaced and projected emotions and conflicts. To quote Griffiths3: When faced with a difficulty {the child} clothes it in symbolism, and experiments in the newer medium. Temporarily leaving the real problem which he cannot overtly work out to its logical conclusion, he develops an analogous situation at the fantasy level . . . . The power and significance of this play is that the child masters his difficulty by his own method. The work of Erikson 2 and Piaget Gconfirms and elaborates this function of play as the way in which a "child thinks over difficult experiences." The child develops a coping style in theprivate world of fantasy play and in the public world of peer play, family play, and play in school and

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in the playground. These arenas provide the stress and opportunities needed to develop the capacity to cope. Adaptive coping involves productive, active, and flexible behavioral strategies that are appropriate to the environment and enhance the child's efforts to care for himself. 12

Ego Strength
In the third analog play builds ego strength. The ego acts as the mediator between various levels of reality or the demands of separate agencies of the mind. The activities of play build ego strength by enhancing the integration and expression of contradictory realities, emotions, and demands. "Cathartic theories" of play describe the ways in which play releases "pent-up emotions ''5 and provides substitute or alternative channels for expression of instinctual needs. The playing experience has a unique relationship to reality which contributes to the strengthening of the ego. Cognitively, playing is particularly suited to the expression of emotion; psychodynamically play is equally-weU positioned to handle instinctual conflict and expression. Piaget's description of cognitive development points out that play and fantasy are connected to the expression of emotion through the special characteristics of preoperational or intuitive thought. Numerous authors have referred to the dual nature of play in which "the player faces inward to his unconscious and outward to reality."4 Winnicott13 refers to play as the area of experience "between subjectivity and objectivity" and Bateson 14positions play "half-way between primary and secondary process" thinking. Play and fantasy serve to express and enrich the child's emotional life. Fear, joy, sadness, anger, and interest become amplified and familiar through dramatic play, athletic contests, doll play, and on the game boards of latency. Play also helps children to "renounce instinctual satisfactions by creating substitutions that permit partial discharge . . . . ,, 4 In this way play is a "step toward sublimation." Play is the arena in which the basic concerns of the drives and instincts are compensated for, expressed, and managed. For example, the child manages attachment and separation in infancy through peek-a-boo and in latency through hide-and-seek. Doctor games, spin-the-bottle, and post-office allow for a redirection of sexual-sensual drives from the parents to peers and siblings; and finally competitive sports are one example of the opportunity to ritualize, redirect, or channel aggression. Sarnoff 15

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elaborates the way in which sublimation and symbolization develop as ego functions to create a "state of latency." In this state fantasy and play act as "safety valves" sparing the child conflict with real people in the environment, diminishing the impact of drives and circumventing regression. 15

Investment in Life
The fourth analog is the child's capacity to invest in life through his enjoyment of his play and work. Although this paper connects childhood playing with adult functioning, it does not intend a teleological motivation to play. Children play because it is fun--because there is something inherently satisfying in it--not because it is going to have value at some future time. The experience of pleasure associated with play is a part of all the characteristics of play. It refers to the pleasure a child feels in the "doing in itself"; what Piaget refers to as "functional pleasure"~; Groos called the "child's joy in being a cause"l~; and Robert White defined as the feeling of "efficacy" or the "feeling of doing something, of being active or effective, or having an influence on something. ''17 In her longitudinal study of Kansas children, Lois Murphy I2 observed if from birth. She noticed that a child's overall capacity to enjoy himself and his activity in the world were closely connected to the feeling of triumph or " I can do it" feelings 12 This triumph is quite different from the feeling of "bliss" which the infant feels when he has been done for--for example, the feeling after a satisfying feeding. The experience of enjoying one's own efforts is the unique pleasure associated with play and work. Lois Murphy observed that the fun of play may be part of "nature's extravagance or generosity--an extra guarantee that a wide range of sensory, motor, manipulative, or social experiences will be explored." 12 A child's enjoyment of action reflects a developing inner core of the personality. Healthy development depends on an ability to enjoy and expect gratifying exchanges with the environment. Positive expectations mold in turn more eager, optimistic responses to present and future experiences and increase the range of resources for gratification available in the child. The significance of the transformation of the fun of play into this capacity for investment in life is what Kohut will refer to as the "joy of existence" in his formulations of adult psychic development.is This capacity for investment is the internal link in the child's ability to utilize what he has and might develop. Without this capacity, the self

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cannot "avail itself of the talents and skills at an individual's disposal, enabling him to love and work successfully."ls

Conclusion
Let me conclude with two contrasting images: My desk looks onto a park in an urban neighborhood. As I write this paper there are many children of all ages playing in the park. A little league team of girls and boys is practicing on the baseball diamond; parents are swinging children on the swings; one small boy is learning to ride a bicycle; a group of teenagers are lying under a willow tree smoking cigarettes; young boys are riding down a hill on bicycles and doing tricks in the air as they strike the dirt bump at the bottom; and there is a preschool contingent who are busy with building, cooking, throwing, and eating in the sand box. The entire space is filled with children involved in one activity or another with interest, energy, and apparent pleasure. A very different set of images comes to mind when I think of scenes outside of my office at a Child Psychiatric Inpatient Service for latency age children. A cooking group of four children and two adults were starting to make a pizza. An argument began over who would roll out the dough, which ended in two more adults arriving on the scene to remove the furious child who was screaming at the top of his lungs, "No one ever lets me do what I want to do." One child left the group and began to rock anxiously in the living room. The remaining two children completed the pizza. Other members of the group had refused to participate and remained in their rooms. Another child chose to spend his time building an intricate leggo fort, which he had to leave until he agreed to complete his daffy chore, which he had been avoiding since breakfast. In both scenes there are busy, active children. The behaviors and events of each setting could occur in the other, but the predominant moods, activities, and outcomes were markedly different. The playground and ward are both arenas for the development of playing. Pleasure, concentration, interest, and contentment fill the park with only momentary frustrations, quarrels, anger, or sadness. The reverse is true on the ward where excitement, triumph, and success are fleeting and frustration, anxiety, and disappointments prevail if children are left to their own devices. The children on the ward uni-

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formly have a serious and pervasive deficit in their play. The building of competence is inhibited by frequent disruptions in their activities due to impaired social skills; an inability to cope with anxiety and frustrations; the intrusion of intrapsychic conflicts past vulnerable egos; and a basic lack of pleasure in the process of learning, doing, and being for its own sake. The "benign cycle" of development described earlier is replaced by a more "vicious cycle" of development. The children on the ward have deficient competence; they use nonproductive, passive, rigid coping strategies; they function with defecrive egos; and they have major inhibitions and distortions in their capacity to invest in the business of working and playing. At this point it should be clear why Freud's initial formulation of psychological health included the "freedom to love and work." The capacity to work includes more than symptom-free functioning for adults and children. Intrapsychic conflict, neurotic symptomatology, and immature defenses can seriously compromise an individual's capacity to play and work. However, the mere absence of such psychological trouble is not the sufficient factor for the presence of effective and pleasureable work and play in the adult. It has been necessary to explore a child's arena of play for components of healthy adaptation and concepts of positive mental health to find analogs of work capacity. Finally, the affective vitality of mature, healthy work emerges when its childhood roots are examined. Work can bring the concentration, joy, triumph, and contentment we see in a child's play. As George Vaillant 1~reminds us, adaptation is more than adjustment and conformity. Erikson describes how the healthy person "grows or as it were accrues f r o m . . , successive psychosocial stages the increasing capacity to master life's outer and inner dangers--with some vital enthusiasm to spare."2

References
1. Waelder R: The psychoanalytic theory of play. Psychoanal Quart 2: 208.224,1932. 2. Erikson EH: Identity and the life cycle. Psychological issues, Vol 1. New York: International Universities Press, 1959, pp 1-171. 3. Griffiths R: A study of imagination in early childhood. Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1935. 4. Plaut EA: Play adaptation. Psychoanal Study of the Child 34: 217-232, 1979. 5. Erikson EH: Toys and reasons. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. 6. Piaget J: The moral judgment of the child. New York: Harcourt, 1932. 7. Erikson EH: Insight and responsibility. New York: W. W. Norton, 1964.

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8. Smith MB: Competence and socialization. In Clausen J A (ed), Socialization and society. Boston: Little, Brown and Company~ 1968. 9. Freud A: Normality and pathology in childhood: Assessments of development, Vol VI. New York: International Universities Press, 1965. 10. Vaillant G: Adaptation to life. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977. 11. Freud S: Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, Vol 20 (Standard ed), London: Hogarth, 1959, pp 77-178. 12. Murphy LB: The widening world of childhood. New York: Basic Books, 1962. 13. Winnicott DW: Playing and reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971. 14. Bateson G: A Theory of play and fantasy. PsychiatrRes Rep 2: 39-51, 1955. 15. Sarnoff C: Latency. New York: Jason Aronson, 1976. 16. Groos K: Theplay of man. NewYork: Appleton, 1901. 17. White R: Ego and reality in psychoanalytic theory. Psychological issues, Vol. 3, Monograph 11. New York, International Universities Press, 1963. 18. Kohut H: The restoration of the self. New York: International Universities Press, 1977.