Educational psychologist Dr. Doris Bergen reviewed the research linking pretend play to language, problem-solving and theory of mind, and this article explains what her evidence means for parents of young children.
Dr. Doris Bergen is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology at Miami University, and a longtime researcher of play and cognition. Her career has been spent on a question most of us never think to ask: what is actually happening in a child's mind when they pour invisible tea, sell pretend apples, or march wooden animals two by two up an imaginary gangplank?
That question matters because pretend play is so easy to dismiss. It looks like filler, the thing children do between the activities adults consider productive. Bergen's contribution has been to gather the evidence and show that the opposite is closer to the truth. When a four-year-old is deep in a game of shopkeeper, they are doing some of the most demanding cognitive work of which they are capable.
In 2002, Bergen published a review in Early Childhood Research & Practice pulling together the research on pretend play and cognitive development. Her reading of the evidence connects pretend play with a cluster of abilities that predict how well children think and learn: richer language, stronger problem-solving, theory of mind (the ability to understand that other people have thoughts and feelings different from your own), and early academic skill.
The logic behind those connections is not mysterious once you watch pretend play closely. A child running a pretend shop has to hold a scenario in mind, narrate it, negotiate roles with a playmate, improvise when the story changes, and use one object to stand for another. A wooden block becomes a loaf of bread; a button becomes a coin. That act of symbolic substitution, this stands for that, is the same mental move that underpins letters standing for sounds and numerals standing for quantities. Pretend play, in Bergen's account, is a medium for learning, not a break from it.
The source
Bergen (2002), The Role of Pretend Play in Children's Cognitive Development, Early Childhood Research & Practice · Read the original
Just as striking is the timing. As Bergen's review points out, the evidence is strongest exactly in the preschool years, when pretend play naturally peaks. That is not a coincidence worth ignoring. The years when children most want to play shops, hospitals and tea parties are the very years in which that kind of play appears to do its most important cognitive work. Development has, in effect, scheduled the lesson for the moment the pupil is most eager to take it.
First, an honest note about what the evidence can and cannot say. Much of the research Bergen reviewed is associational: children who engage in rich pretend play also tend to show stronger language, problem-solving and theory of mind. That is not the same as proving that pretend play single-handedly causes those gains, and Bergen herself treats the evidence carefully. But the association is consistent, it appears across several distinct abilities, and the mechanisms are plausible. For a parent making everyday decisions, that is a perfectly good basis to act on.
The practical implications are reassuringly simple:
Here is the scene Bergen's research describes, as it actually unfolds on a kitchen floor. A four-year-old has set up shop. Three wooden crates, a row of beech fruit, a queue of one slightly impatient grandparent. "That's two pounds," she says, with the gravity of someone who has decided what two pounds means. She takes the wooden coin, weighs it in her palm, and hands over an apple with both hands because that is how the lady in the greengrocer does it. In ninety seconds she has run arithmetic, social script, role reversal and symbolic substitution, and she would tell you she was just playing shop.
Or watch a Noah's Ark on a winter afternoon. The animals must go in two by two, which is a sorting and pairing problem. The elephants are arguing, which means the child must hold two opposing points of view in mind at once and speak for both. That is theory of mind being rehearsed out loud, one wooden elephant in each hand. A tea party does the same: the bear takes sugar, the rabbit does not, and the host must remember who wants what, the earliest form of keeping someone else's mind in your own.
This is why we think of pretend kits, the shops, arks, animal families and tea sets, as the laboratory of theory of mind. The equipment matters less than the experiment, but good equipment helps: pieces heavy enough to feel real in a small hand, simple enough to become anything, sturdy enough to survive years of daily trade. Jaques London has been making toys on that principle for a very long time, since 1795, which makes it the world's oldest games company. You can see the approach across our wooden toy collection: arks with animals that pair, shops that stock real wooden produce, tea sets that pour nothing at all, magnificently. None of them does anything by itself. That is the point. The child supplies the story, and the story, as Bergen's evidence suggests, is where the thinking happens.
A practical note for the preschool years: choose one or two pretend worlds and let them deepen, rather than rotating novelty. A well-made wooden set that stays out on a low shelf gets revisited daily, and revisited play grows more complex each time, longer plots, more characters, harder negotiations. The hundredth game of shop is cognitively richer than the first.
Bergen's full review is short, readable and freely available: The Role of Pretend Play in Children's Cognitive Development. For more on this theme, read our guide to pretend play, the wider case in why real play matters, and the research summary in the science.
Simple pretending, feeding a teddy, holding a block to the ear as a phone, typically emerges in toddlerhood, and pretend play grows steadily richer through the preschool years. Bergen's review notes that this preschool peak is exactly where the evidence linking pretend play to cognitive development is strongest, so roughly ages three to five are the prime window to protect.
No. Repetition is how pretend play deepens. A familiar scenario frees the child to add complexity: new characters, longer plots, trickier problems. The fiftieth tea party is doing more cognitive work than the first, not less. Worry less about variety and more about whether the play has time, space and an occasional willing co-star.
It is not the same activity. The abilities Bergen's evidence highlights, language negotiation, role-taking, using one object to stand for another, depend on the child generating the story and other people responding in real time. An app supplies the story, the rules and the responses, which removes most of the cognitive work. A cardboard box and a patient adult are a far better shop.
Mostly you need to make room for it and join in occasionally. Children are natural pretenders, but play gets richer with a partner who takes a role, asks questions inside the story and follows the child's lead. Be the customer, not the manager. If play seems stuck, add a simple prop or a new problem, the shop has run out of apples, and let your child solve it.
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