Parent-Child Social Play in a Children's Museum

     This article is about the importance of pretend play. A case study was design to show how parents and children interact with pretend play. The results from the case study gave a better understanding why parents and children did not fully engage in the pretend play suggested by the exhibit. The procedure involved four to six year olds and their parent(s). The exhibit was of a pretend grocery store. The observer analysis what they did and their interaction. The data was coded in four phases. In the first phase of the open coding, defined as a single comment contributed by one participant. This  was emerged were pretend play, exploring, and self-regulatory. Concepts consisted of parents trying to engage children in classifying, counting, and weighing; and exploring social concept. Interrater reliability of coded utterances in 30% of transcripts was 96%Phase two: pretend play emerging as the central phenomenon. Role taking and pretend play appeared to be the means for many other activities, including exploring concepts and self regulatory guilding. In the third phase, in order to organize the data into a story line reflecting the pretend play of each parent-child dyad, each  dyad was written in a transcript. In the fourth phase, the play narratives were revealed in relationship and strategies for initiating and maintaining play and the consequences to play interaction. Results of the experiment, they role played, initiating, maintaining, and disrupting play. while children entered pretend play immediately without explicitly organizing the roles, activities, or sequence of play script.