Pretend Play and the Development of Emotion Regulation in Preschool Children

Abstract

Children's pretend play has been proposed as a mode of social interaction that enhances the development of emotion regulation ability. It was hypothesized that children who demonstrated adaptive emotion regulation in pretend play and/or engaged in pretend play with parents would be more proficient at emotion regulation in a wider context. Forty‐seven pre‐school boys and girls, aged 4 to 5 years, and their parents participated. Emotion regulation was assessed in a pretend play context using a negatively valenced event designed to elicit a high level of arousal. Children's responses were categorized according to successfully continuing pretend play and effectively resolving conflict. Children's success in continuing pretend play was related to emotion regulation skills in other contexts, whereas their effectiveness at resolving conflict was not. Children who engaged in pretend play frequently, and who did so with caregivers, had higher ratings of emotion regulation. This study provides some support for the relationship between pretend play and emotion regulation, and emphasizes the need for further research to examine the effects of parent‐child pretend play interaction on the development of emotion regulation skills.