What Is Play? 327 Young Children Give Science a Surprisingly Clear Answer

Ask an adult to define play and the answer quickly becomes slippery, a blur of words like fun, games, and learning. Ask a five-year-old, and something remarkable can happen. In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers in Switzerland interviewed 327 children aged four to eight and simply asked, “Can you tell me what play is?” Their answers, published in the Early Childhood Education Journal, reveal not only that young children can articulate a coherent and sophisticated conception of play, but that their conception differs in meaningful ways from the frameworks adults have built to describe it.

The study was led by Patricia Lannen of the Marie Meierhofer Children’s Institute at the University of Zurich, together with colleagues from University Children’s Hospital Insel Bern and the Zurich University of Teacher Education, and formed part of a nationally funded longitudinal project on playfulness in early childhood. The team deliberately avoided group interviews, pictures, puppets, and other creative elicitation techniques that prior research suggests can bias children’s responses or steer their attention. Instead, each child sat alone with a trained interviewer in a quiet corner of their kindergarten and answered one open-ended, minimally structured question, recorded and later transcribed according to established qualitative rules.

The theoretical backdrop to the work is a decades-old puzzle. Play is universally recognized as central to childhood, yet no universally accepted definition of it exists. In 1980, Lee Krasnor and Debra Pepler proposed an explicative rather than a definitional approach, listing four features—positive affect, flexibility, intrinsic motivation, and nonliterality—and arguing that the more of them co-occur in a child’s action, the closer the behavior comes to pure play. Peter Smith and Renée Vollstedt later added a fifth feature, means before end, capturing the idea that in play the process matters more than the outcome. Crucially, however, these features were derived largely from adult observers. Whether they actually match what play means to the children themselves had rarely been tested at scale.

Of the 327 children interviewed, 165, roughly half, produced differentiated, coherent descriptions that could be analyzed systematically. Another twenty-one gave tautological answers such as “playing is playing,” twenty provided only partial or off-topic responses, and 109 said they did not know or gave no answer. The researchers caution that silence should not be mistaken for absence of understanding. Some children, they note, may have assumed the interviewer already knew the correct answer, a challenge tied to developing theory of mind, or may simply have struggled to verbalize a mental image they possessed. One child put it plainly: “I know what playing is, but I can’t explain it.”

The content analysis used a two-stage approach, combining deductive categories drawn from the Smith and Vollstedt framework with inductive categories allowed to emerge from the material itself. All five established features appeared in the children’s accounts, confirming that the classic framework does resonate with children’s own experience. Positive affect surfaced in statements like “playing makes you happy,” but also, tellingly, in children’s descriptions of play as an antidote to boredom—“you never get bored when you play”—suggesting that play regulates emotion in both directions, by producing pleasure and by extinguishing unpleasant states.

Flexibility and intrinsic motivation emerged as expressions of autonomy and self-direction. “For me, playing is when you are allowed to choose. When I play, I get to decide,” one child explained. Others described play as inventing something, or as the exhilarating freedom to rearrange entire rooms of material into shifting imaginary worlds. Nonliterality, the “as if” quality of pretend play, appeared in children who described animating figures, turning a built contraption into a flying object, or playing mother and child—though notably this abstract feature was mentioned far less often than the emotional and social dimensions. Means before end appeared in children who described play as simply doing or tinkering without any goal to achieve.

The inductive analysis, however, proved the most revealing. Three additional features emerged that no established framework contains. The first, social interaction, was in fact the single most frequent feature in the entire dataset, named by 26.7 percent of children with differentiated responses. Children described play overwhelmingly as something done with peers and siblings—being together, playing with one another, building something with friends. Parents and teachers were strikingly absent from these mental images of play, echoing earlier findings that children view adults as frequent restrictors of play rather than natural play partners, and that children act most playfully when adults remain present but uninvolved in the background.

The second inductive category, object reference, appeared in 21.2 percent of responses. For many children, play was almost synonymous with toys and things: building blocks, dolls, remote-controlled cars, and, in the children’s wonderfully unfiltered inventories, clothespins, toilet rolls, plastic bottles, iPads, tractors, and cordless screwdrivers. Others emphasized the tactile and bodily pleasure of manipulating objects—“doing something with your hands”—and the ways objects serve as fulcrums of early social interaction through joint attention and sharing. The third category, children’s business, captured the conviction that play belongs exclusively to children: “playing is actually what children are allowed to do,” and “playing is actually for us kids.” For these children, play is not merely an activity they engage in; it is their domain, their territory within the social world of childhood.

The findings carry immediate practical weight for educators, parents, and policymakers. Because children equate play with choice, peers, materials, and ownership, early childhood settings support play best by protecting long, uninterrupted periods of child-initiated activity in which children decide what to do, with whom, and with what. The prominence of peer interaction argues for preserving time and space for shared play and for helping children who struggle to enter it, while the strong object reference supports approaches such as loose parts play, in which open-ended, non-commercial materials invite manipulation, construction, and symbolic transformation. Adults, the study suggests, should adopt an onlooker posture—attentive, emotionally available, ready to help—without prematurely taking control. The authors also warn that labeling an activity “playful learning” does not make it play from a child’s perspective, particularly when the activity is directed, evaluated, or subordinated to a predefined outcome, which conflicts directly with the means-before-end quality children themselves expressed.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates that children as young as five are far more capable research informants than the field long assumed, and that the closer a research question sits to children’s immediate everyday lives, the more reliable their testimony becomes. The authors acknowledge limitations: the sample was dominated by five- and six-year-olds from predominantly high-education families, and the unequal age spread prevented robust conclusions about developmental change. Yet the core message stands with unusual clarity for a qualitative field. Children’s conceptions of play encompass the abstract features scientists have catalogued, but they are anchored in the concrete stuff of childhood—friends, toys, freedom, and a sense that play is, above all, their own business. Listening to that voice, the researchers argue, should reshape how we design classrooms, write policies, and even how we think about the purpose of play itself.

Subject of Research: Young children's subjective understanding of what play is, studied through interviews with 327 children aged four to eight

Article Title: Play Through Children’s Eyes—The Subjective Meaning of Play to Young Children

Article References: Lannen, P., Pritz, L. N., Duss, I., Ruedisueli, C., & Seiler, C. W. (2026). Play Through Children’s Eyes—The Subjective Meaning of Play to Young Children. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02359-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02359-6

Keywords: play, early childhood, children's perspectives, playfulness, qualitative research, preschool children, child development, social interaction, pretend play, early childhood education, play theory, participatory research