Playing with Ideas: Evaluating the Impact of the Ultimate Block Party, a Collective Experiential Intervention to Enrich Perceptions of Play

Parental attitudes shape play opportunities afforded to children in home, community, and school settings. This study presents evaluation of an intervention designed to enrich parent's conception of play and its relationship with socially valued skills and capacities. On the basis of data from 291 racially and ethnically diverse parents/caregivers of young children (median age between 3 and 6) attending an event in NYC, we find the intervention helped parents conceptualize play in complex ways and altered perceptions of its impact on children's current--but not future--lives. Multivariate analyses reveal the causal pathway for these changes as exposure to multiple play sites, rather than time at the event--a finding with direct implications for exposing parents to developmental science in community settings.