Abstract
The classic work on children's free play in groups was carried out by M.Parten(1932). She developed an influential coding scheme composed of six categories ranging from onlooker to co-operative play, and concluded that these categories represented the level of social maturity. Recently, Rubin et al.(1976), and P.Smith(1978)re-examined Parten's scheme and concluded that it does not always fit developmental stages. However, these studies could not show which of the conditions for development leads to co-operative play. This study approaches this problem by observing whether children of 3 to 5 years of age could engage in co-operative play. We observed various types of play between an adult and a child. An adult as a partner of play was used so that we could control the adult's attitude to the child during play. This enabled us to set two conditions for our observations and analyse the difference between them. Our data shows that even at the age of 2 most of the children could carry on co-operative play with adults. Using this data we were able to represent the developmental difference among each age group. As our conclusion we suggest that the play characteristic of each age group is as follows. The play of the group of 2-year-olds is mainly at the level of affectional interaction with adults. The group of 3-year-olds has a particular favourite type of play and sometimes this favourite play is given precedence to engaging in interaction with an adult. The group of 4-year-olds clearly recognizes a motivation to carry on co-operative play with an adult. The group of 5-year-olds can take the leadership vis-a-vis an adult during play.
