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It is well-established that caregiver stress is linked to increased emotional distress among children, and recent evidence highlights similar associations between caregiver and child emotional well-being during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Examining protective factors and coping mechanisms that are associated with resiliency in the face of pandemic-related stress can highlight potential strategies that may help children adapt to other unexpected hardships outside of a global pandemic. Previous research found that playing about the pandemic moderated an association between caregiver stress and children's emotional distress. However, few studies have explored "pandemic play" among children from low-income households, where pandemic-related stressors were often exacerbated. In the present study, 72 caregivers of Head Start preschoolers between 3 and 6 years of age were surveyed between late 2020 and early 2021. Results revealed that 32% of children engaged in pandemic play frequently. Caregiver stress was positively associated with child emotional distress, but only among children who did not engage in pandemic play frequently. These findings support the idea that child-directed play may be a developmentally appropriate and accessible coping mechanism to reduce the emotional burden of stressful events on children, regardless of economic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) led to many lifestyle changes and economic hardships for families with young children. Previous research on risk and resilience highlights that children's adjustment to family hardships is influenced by caregiver stress, but individual child behaviors and characteristics may protect children from negative outcomes. Interestingly, many children have been reported to incorporate COVID-19 themes in their pretend play. Theory suggests children may do so to cope with pandemic-related stress, but no empirical studies have explored this possibility. The purpose of this study was to understand the process by which COVID-19 economic hardships experienced by a family were related to children's emotional well-being and development and to investigate how this process may vary as a function of children's engagement in pandemic-related pretend play. Caregivers (N = 99; mostly high earning families) of preschoolers ages 3–6 years (51% girls, 82% White) living in the United States participated in an online survey at two time points during the pandemic. Result revealed that COVID-19 economic hardships were related to increased caregiver stress, which, in turn, was associated with children's emotional distress and poorer self-regulation. However, engaging in pandemic-related pretend play appeared to protect children's well-being by weakening the adverse association between caregivers' stress and children's emotional distress. Thus, addressing caregiver stress levels and allowing children an outlet to cope with challenges through pretend play could have crucial protective effects on early development and well-being during times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Engagement in social pretense predicted preschoolers' inhibitory control growth. • Gains associated with social pretense held controlling for other forms of social play. • Solitary pretense did not predict gains in inhibitory control. Recent experimental evidence suggests that engaging in pretend play can improve children's executive functions (EFs). Yet, evidence regarding how play relates to the development of EF remains sparse. The current study investigated whether preschoolers' social and solitary pretend play over the course of one preschool year predicted growth in inhibitory control, a key component of EF. Participants were 132 Spanish-speaking preschoolers (M age = 53 months) from 10 Head Start classrooms in the southwest United States. Multiple 15-s naturalistic observations of children's interactions (e.g., social, solitary) and activities (e.g., pretense, non-pretense) were gathered across free-play classroom contexts. Among observed play behaviors, social pretense was the only predictor of inhibitory control growth in preschool contexts. The current study speaks to the importance of continued research on play-based interventions, especially in diverse populations, and corroborates a growing body of theoretical and empirical evidence for the importance of pretend play in the development of EF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]