5.5 Culture in Play-Based Learning

Culture plays an important role in determining the activities that children are exposed to at a young age, what toys they have to play with, and the skills that they learn.

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has been widely accepted to describe the stages of cognitive reasoning and abilities children acquire. According to Piaget, the sensorimotor stage , which occurs between birth and age 2, is characterized by developing motor skills and interaction with the world through the senses; the preoperational stage, which occurs between ages 2 and 7, is characterized by developing language and symbolic thinking; the concrete operational stage, which occurs between ages 7 and 11, is when children acquire the ability to understand operations like conservation and reversibility; and the formal operational stage , which occurs from age 12 through adolescence, is when abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning abilities form.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development has been taught as a universal blueprint for children’s cognitive development. However, researchers who have explored cognitive development in children around the world have found evidence of children developing according to different timelines based on the activities prevalent in their cultures. For example, children of pottery makers in Mexican villages show acquisition of the operation of conservation (of number, liquid, weight, and volume) at much earlier ages due to playing with clay and recognizing that reshaping clay does not change the amount of clay present (Price-Williams et al., 1969).

Cultural values and norms also inform the toys and types of play that children are directed toward. Scientists have found biological differences in early toy preference, with boys preferring toys with propulsive movement or that allow for construction (Benenson, Tennyson, & Wrangham, 2011), which is hypothesized to be due to their relative advantage in mental rotation and higher activity levels (Campbell & Eaton, 1999). In contrast, girls have better fine motor control of their fingers and are more attracted to social stimuli (Leeb & Rejskind, 2004), and they thus may initially have a slight preference for toys with facial features or opportunities for nurturance (Alexander, Wilcox, & Woods, 2009). These differences have been attributed to sex hormone exposure, as boys are exposed to higher levels of androgens prenatally and in the first 6 months of life than girls, resulting in masculinization of behavior and neural systems (Hines, 2004). However, although slight preference differences may be present early on, researchers have also documented significantly different gendered patterns in how caregivers provide play opportunities, and, although young children do not initially understand that toys are gendered, they quickly learn that certain toys are “for boys” and others are “for girls” (Francis, 2010). Importantly, the gendered nature of toys and play not only shape children’s notions of what is off-limits for them, and thus constrain their available freedom, but also afford girls more opportunities to develop communication skills and emotional literacy and boys more opportunities to develop technical knowledge and skills, which can contribute to later curriculum preferences in schooling (Francis & Skelton, 2005).