Abstract
Play is a term we use to describe much of the activity of infants and young children. Despite the fact that children of all ages spend a large percentage of their waking time engaged in play, the term itself remains difficult to define and to operationalize formally. Particularly difficult are efforts to distinguish play from exploration. When is a child playing and when is a child exploring? Weisler and McCall (1976), like many others, have come to the conclusion that it is fruitless to advance formal definitions of terms like play and exploration because it is simply impossible to distinguish the two in the ongoing stream of the child’s behavior.
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Vondra, J., Belsky, J. (1989). Infant Play at One Year. In: Lockman, J.J., Hazen, N.L. (eds) Action in Social Context. Perspectives in Developmental Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9000-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9000-9_6
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