The benefits of fantasy fiction and imaginative play

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Fantasy has ancient roots, but it gets a bad rap. Some worry that fantasy fiction may confuse young children. Others dismiss fantasy every bit silly or frivolous.

Should children steer articulate of fantasy play and fantasy entertainment? Is reading fantasy fiction a waste material of time?

Studies suggest the respond is no.

Young children are quite savvy about fantasy elements in fiction. They are quick to place them equally impossible. And research indicates that fantasy fiction and fantasy play tin can benefit kids.

Engaging with fantasy can stimulate creativity and heave vocabulary. Information technology may help children develop ameliorate cocky-regulation skills. It might even enhance their working retentiveness performance.

So let's accept a look at the testify — the way young children answer to fantastic stories and imaginative play.

Not so hands confused: Preschoolers sympathize that fantasy scenarios can't happen in real life.

We ofttimes hear that young children tin can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Only is it true?

Non really. Not if what we mean is something similar "preschoolers are liable to retrieve that Spiderman exists because they've seen him in books or on television."

In truth, preschoolers practice make some errors of judgment, merely not in this direction.

Most young children are actuallyhyper-skeptical.

For example, Andrew Shtluman and Susan Carey presented four-yr-olds with a series of events in an illustrated storybook. And so they asked the children to judge whether the events depicted could happen in existent life.

The kids correctly identified impossible events – like a character walking through walls. But they also incorrectly rejected many events that were merely improbable – like a grapheme drinking onion juice, or owning a panthera leo as a pet (Shtulman and Carey 2007).

Similarly, in experiments involving animated cartoons, Hui Li and her colleagues found evidence that children err on the side of skepticism.

"Even iv-year-olds have a fairly good understanding of fantastical events in blithe cartoons," say the researchers. When these kids make mistakes, information technology tends to be in the direction of dismissing realistic events as impossible (Li et al 2015).

The phenomenon can be observed with religious stories too.

In studies of American children from Christian homes, researchers found that 4-year-olds were very skeptical of tales involving supernatural events and divine intervention (Wooley and Cox 2007; Vaden and Wooley 2011).

Researchers didn't run across kids have a more accepting stance until they were five or 6, peradventure because kids this age are more than likely to receive explicit religious didactics (Wooley and Ghossainy 2013).

So it isn't that immature children get things wrong, or tin't be persuaded to believe in fantastic things. They can. But experiments suggest we take to actively sway them – provide them with evidence, or trade on our adult credibility to convince children that a fantastic proposition is true (Subbotsky 1993; Boerger et al 2009).

If the fantasy is presented equally entertainment, it isn't very probable to inspire confusion – not, at any rate, to the sort of confusion that would pb kids to recollect that humans can fly, or walk through walls, or plough themselves invisible.

Ane exception: Immature children may struggle more with the fantasy vs. reality distinction if they are very fearful.

In studies of preschoolers, kids suffering from chronic, high levels of fear perform more poorly on fantasy-reality tests.

And then if you lot accept a young child who experiences severe nighttime fears – or lots of daytime anxiety – your child is more decumbent to believe that, say, a supernatural monster actually exists (Zisenwine et al 2013; Petkova and Cain 2017).

Only proceed in mind: This doesn't hateful these children should avoid all forms of fantasy. At that place are enough of happy, non-threatening fantasy stories for kids to enjoy. Encountering such content — and talking about it — may help children improve their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

In back up of this idea, an experiment on older children constitute that both six- and nine-twelvemonth-olds developed better bigotry abilities after watching a film depicting magical events.

Compared to kids who watched a not-magical motion picture, the fantasy-exposed children became better at spotting fantasy elements in a series of photographs and paintings (Subbotsky and Slater 2011).

What well-nigh the idea that fantasy is a mere distraction? Is fantasy play just mindless fun? Is reading fantasy fiction a waste material of time?

On the contrary, studies indicate that fantasy can benefit children in several important ways.

Watching a movie with magical content tin stimulate inventiveness.

The evidence comes from experiments involving the flick, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Rock.

Eugene Subbotsky and colleagues began by measuring children'southward creative tendencies. They asked 6- and 8-twelvemonth-olds to draw pictures of "funny, crazy, impossible" objects that "could non exist in the real world." They also challenged kids to move across a room in equally many dissimilar ways as possible.

Adjacent, with these baseline measurements in hand, the researchers assigned each child to encounter 1 of two 15-minute film clips.

Both clips came from the moving-picture show,Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. But 1 prune featured lots of magical content. The other — while just equally action-packed — featured merely naturalistic events.

Did the content take any impact?

To find out, Subbotsky'south squad re-tested each kid'due south power to "call up outside the box," and the results favored the kids who had watched the magical content. Those children showed greater gains in their artistic thinking performance (Subbotsky et al 2010).

Fantasy fiction may also inspire preschoolers to acquire new words.

How exercise we know? Deena Skolnick-Weisberg and her colleagues recruited more than 150 kids to participate in a preschool-based intervention.

They assigned all the children to participate in daily, twenty-minute long sessions of storytelling and pretend play. But there were ii dissimilar weather condition.

Half the kids were assigned to the low-fantasy condition, which introduced new vocabulary words in the context of storybooks and pretend play that emphasized realistic events.

These children encountered some fantasy elements (i.e., anthropomorphic animals that can talk). But the situations were relatively mundane (e.k., working on a farm, or making a pot of soup).

The other half were assigned to thehigh-fantasy condition, which introduced to new vocabulary words in the context of storybooks and pretend play that featured totally imaginary creatures and events – similar dragons hatching from breakfast eggs.

Before the new sessions began, the researchers tested children'southward vocabulary knowledge. Then, later on viii days of the intervention, the kids were tested again. And there was a departure between groups: Kids in the high-fantasy condition used more new vocabulary in their spontaneous speech (Skolnick-Weisberg et al 2015).

Fantasy play might help preschoolers develop "executive functions" – the mental abilities that allow them to concentrate, make plans, keep their emotional impulses nether control.

Executive functions are the mental processes that help us self-regulate. They include the abilities to override impulses, stay focused, and track information in working retention. They likewise include the capacity to switch flexibly in response to a change of rules.

Could fantasy play assist children hone these abilities and skills? In that location's reason to retrieve so. For instance, consider the evidence from correlational studies.

• When researchers tested more than 100 preschoolers, they found that kids with a rich fantasy life tended to perform better on tasks that required them to shift from one set of rules to some other (Pierrucci et al 2013).

• A follow-up study on some other group of preschoolers constitute that fantasy-prone children exhibited amend emotional regulation skills than their peers, even after bookkeeping for other factors, like a child's language ability (Gilpin et al 2015).

• Other inquiry has reported a link betwixt fantasy play and emotional understanding amongst kickoff and second graders: Kids who engaged in more cognitively sophisticated fantasy play tended to be more savvy about the emotions of others (Seja and Russ 1999).

And there is experimental show as well. A recent study suggests that we tin ameliorate executive function by encouraging children to engage in fantasy play.

There were 110 children in all – preschoolers between the ages of 3 and 5.

Rachel Thibodeau and her colleagues randomly assigned one third of these kids to daily, adult-guided sessions of pretend, fantasy play (east.g., let's exist birds!).

Another group of children were randomly assigned to participate in guided sessions of non-fantasy games (like playing ball).

And a third group experienced "business every bit usual" at their preschools – no special play sessions.

Afterward 5 weeks, children in the fantasy play group made significant gains in working memory performance. Kids in the other two groups did not (Thibodeau et al 2016).

And when the researchers drilled down – comparing individual children in the fantasy play grouping – they found a dosage outcome. The more intensely a child engaged in fantasy play, the greater his or her improvement by the cease of the study.

Then it seems that fantasy can inspire creative thinking and motivate children to learn new vocabulary. It may besides help kids develop skills crucial for concentration and impulse command. There's nada frivolous or impractical about that.

And nevertheless practicality isn't everything. Fantasy would be important even without these practical benefits. It'southward a source of delight and inspiration. It allows us to come across things from new perspectives. It can greatly aggrandize our feel of life.

So we don't demand specific educational justifications to indulge a child'southward sense of fantasy. They are simply icing on the cake. Nosotros owe children fantasy in the same way that we owe them music, sense of humour, science, philosophy, and art. It'southward part of our inheritance every bit a big-brained, artistic species. It'due south our children's birthright.

More than reading

How else can we help children learn? Check out these Parenting Science articles.

• The cognitive benefits of play
• Teaching self-control
• Working memory tips: Helping kids reach their total potential
• Social skills activities for children and teens

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References: The benefits of fantasy fiction and imaginative play

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Gilpin AT, Brown MM, and Pierucci JM. 2015. Relations between fantasy orientation and emotion regulation in preschool. Early on Education and Development 26(7): 920-932.

Li H, Boguszewski Chiliad, and Lillard AS. 2015. Can that really happen? Children's knowledge about the reality condition of fantastical events in television.J Exp Child Psychol. 139:99-114.

Petkova AV, Cain KM. 2017. Preschool Fantasy-Reality Discrimination: Influences of Trait and Primed Fearfulness. J Genet Psychol. 178(2):133-138.

Seja AL, Russ SW. Children'southward fantasy play and emotional understanding. J Clin Child Psychol. 1999 Jun;28(2):269-77.

Shtulman A and Carey S. 2007. Improbable or impossible? How children reason most the possibility of extraordinary events. Kid Dev. 2007 May-Jun;78(3):1015-32.

Subbotsky East, Hysted C, Jones N. 2010. Watching films with magical content facilitates creativity in children. Percept Mot Skills 111(1):261-77.

Subbotsky East and Slater Due east. 2011. Children'south discrimination of fantastic vs. realistic visual displays afterwards watching a film with magical content. Percept Mot Skills. 112(2):603-9.

Thibodeau RB, Gilpin AT, Brown MM, Meyer BA. 2016. The furnishings of fantastical pretend-play on the development of executive functions: An intervention study. J Exp Child Psychol. 145:120-38.

Vaden VC and Woolley JD. 2011. Does God go far real? Children's belief in religious stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Child Dev. 82(iv):1120-35.

Weisberg DS, Ilgaz H, Hirsh-Pasek K, Golinkoff RM, Nicolopoulou A and Dickinson DK. 2015. Shovels and swords: How realistic and fantastical themes affect children'southward give-and-take learning. Cerebral Development, 35, 1-xiv.

Woolley JD and Cox Five. 2007. Development of beliefs about storybook reality. Developmental Scientific discipline. 10:681–693.

Woolley JD and Due east Ghossainy M. 2013. Revisiting the fantasy-reality stardom: children as naïve skeptics. Child Dev. 84(v):1496-510.

Zisenwine T, Kaplan Yard, Kushnir J, Sadeh A. 2013. Nighttime fears and fantasy-reality differentiation in preschool children. Kid Psychiatry Hum Dev. 44(1):186-99.

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Content terminal modified 10/2019

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