Children at Play: Clinical and Developmental Approaches to Meaning and Representation [Hardcover]

Arietta Slade (Editor), Dennie Palmer Wolf (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1994

As they play, children do more than imagine--they also invent life-long approaches to thinking, feeling, and relating to other people. For nearly a century, clinical psychologists have been concerned with the content and interpersonal meaning of play. More recently, developmental psychologists have concentrated on the links between the emergence of symbolic play and evolving thought and language. At last, this volume bridges the gap between the two disciplines by defining their common interests and by developing areas of interface and interrelatedness. The editors have brought together original chapters by distinguished psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, social workers, and developmental psychologists who shed light on topics outside the traditional confines of their respective domains. Thus the book features clinicians exploring subjects such as play representation, narrative, metaphor, and symbolization, and developmentalists examining questions regarding affect, social development, conflict, and psychopathology. Taken together, the contributors offer a rich, integrative view of the many dimensions of early play as it occurs among peers, between parent and child, and in the context of therapy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Slade and Wolf's well-edited text brings important strengths to the descriptive study of the uses of play and also highlights what it is that we have yet to learn about this vitally important human activity. ... It is coherent, despite the diversity of opinion and experience expressed by the writers, and the styles are relatively consistent . ... If you are going to have one text in your library devoted to the understanding of children and play, this is the one to have because of its depth, clinical scope and appropriate anchoring in research." -- Journal of the American Academy of Adolescent Psychiatry

"The present book provides an important integration on both theoretical and practical grounds. The tasks at hand are to widen the developmental base about play and the role of mutual regulation across cultures, to generate empirical evidence for the interdependence between cognition and affect, and to incorporate experimental rigor in designing intervention studies." -- Contemporary Psychology

"Successfully integrates clinical and developmental approaches to children's symbolic play."--Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography, 1995

"This book successfully integrates clinical and developmental approaches to children's symbolic play."--Book Notices

About the Author

Arietta Slade, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dennie Palmer Wolf, Senior Research Associate, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 27, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195044142
• ISBN-13: 978-0195044140
• Product Dimensions: 14.4 x 9.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,434,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)