The game according to Piaget (1996) is very relationed to child development because it is an essential element for the correct physical and psychological development of the minor. Also, he confirms that this element allows the child to form his/her personality besides to know the characteristics of the environment around him in a more effective way. In relation with education, this author establishes that the game helps the kid to acquire his/her motor, mental, social, affective and emotional skills, besides awakening his/her interest for observing and exploring the world that surrounds them. In this way, López (2010) confirms that:
The game is converted in a process of discovery of the outside reality in that the child is forming and reconstructing progressively his/her concepts about the world. Besides, it helps him/her to discover his/herself and to form his/her personality.
Focusing on the process of documentation, the symbolic game inside the stages of development established by Piaget, the symbolic game is in the preoperational stage (2-7 years old) (Valdés, 2014). It is in which the kid recreates the reality, he/she plays “as if…”. In it, the kid reproduces situations of daily life in which appears complex subjects such as illness, death, household problems….
In this way, the game itself can help them to experiment their emotions, recreate and treat conflicting issues which they will have to live with. They recreate situations which allow them to prepare for the moment when they have to live it.
Freud talks about the symbolic game as a part of the reality represented in a particular way in which the kid creates and organizes his/her own world (Landeira, 1998). In the same way, Piaget (cited in Bofarull, 2014) considered that the symbolic game is like the key moment of the child’s game in which they create his/her own world through which they assimilate the real world, the “adult world”. In it they assume different roles without the limitations imposed by the grown-ups. On the other hand, Vidal (2014) defines it as that game in which the objects are transformed into not present elements.
To sum up, the authors mentioned above agree that symbolic games are a very important part of childhood, in which the most important things are not the objects or the actions but what the child represents with it.
References
Bofarull, N. (2014). El juego simbólico y la adquisición del lenguaje en alumnos del 2° ciclo de E.I. (Trabajo de maestría). Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, España. Recuperado de: https://reunir.unir.net/bitstream/handle/123456789/2500/bofarull.sanz.pdf?sequen ce=1
López, I. (2010). El juego en Educación Infantil y Primaria. Autodidacta. Revista de la Educación en Extremadura, 19-37. Recuperado de: http://educacioninicial.mx/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JuegoEIP.pdf
Landeira, S. (1998). El juego simbólico en el niño: explicación e interpretación en J. Piaget y en S. Freud. Buenos Aires. Recuperado de: https://luzaro.net/wp- content/uploads/juego_simbolico.pdf
Piaget, J. (1966). Response to Sutton – Smith. Psychological Review, 73, 111-112.
Valdes, A. (2014). Etapas del desarrollo cognitivo de Piaget. [Doctorado Psicología- Educación, Universidad Marista de Guadalajara]. Recuperado de: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Armando_Valdes_Velazquez/publication/327219515_Etapas_del_desarrollo_cognitivo_de_Piaget/links/5b80af4c4585151fd1307 d84/Etapas-del-desarrollo-cognitivo-de-Piaget.pdf
Vidal, A. (2014, Noviembre 29). Juego simbólico ¿Qué es?. Simbòlics Psicoteràpia. Recuperado de: https://www.simbolics.cat/cas/juego-simbolico-que-es/
Authorship
María González González, Lucía de María Allende y Lydia Trueba Expósito, 2020.