Playing with dolls helps kids’ social skills: study
A study found that playing with Barbie dolls helps children develop vital social skills and develop empathy.
Cardiff University researchers have found that playing with dolls helps both boys and girls reach important milestones in developing social understanding, and is particularly beneficial for children who have problems with their peers.
The six-week study found that children were more likely to use emotional language and play socially when they played with dolls than when they played with tablets, and they were also more likely to play with dolls with siblings, friends or parents.
Dr. from Cardiff University School of Psychology. Sarah Gerson said: “We believe that baby play can encourage children to become more involved in social interactions and give children more opportunities to rehearse or reflect the beliefs, feelings or intentions of others than other types of play.
“When playing with dolls, children have the opportunity to role-play characters, create narratives and act out scenarios; doing this builds on and develops the ability to imagine the thoughts, feelings and intentions of others.
“These imaginary play scenarios allow children to practice social skills, emotional processing, and emotion regulation in a safe environment.”
Over the course of six weeks, researchers assigned four- to eight-year-olds to play with Barbie and Ken dolls or a tablet with preloaded games and asked their parents to keep diaries of how often they played with them, for how long, and whether their child had played with any of them.
The games installed on the tablet were intended to be open-ended, without strict goals such as playing with dolls, where children could build cities for the characters or style the characters’ hair.
At the beginning and end of the six weeks, the children were tested on how well they understood the mental states of others through play sessions in the laboratory and a special test that measured the concept of “false belief.”
False belief is the ability to understand that others may have false beliefs, and is the cornerstone of the concept of “theory of mind,” that is, the ability to understand and differentiate the thoughts of others.
Dr Gerson said theory of mind was “a fundamental skill for developing relationships with peers, teachers and parents, and a skill that people acquire throughout their lives to develop relationships as adults.”
“Most research examining the development of theory of mind has focused on interactions with caregivers, siblings, or peers. We wanted to further understand how play can be a critical mechanism for children to learn cognitive and socioemotional skills,” he said.
The findings come after British government research revealed that nearly 98 per cent of children watch screens every day by the age of two, with parents and teachers warning that it is harder to concentrate on learning when they start school.
The research also found that children with the highest amount of screen time (about five hours a day) were able to say far fewer words than children who watched for about 44 minutes at the other end of the scale.
