Developmental psychologist Dr. Laura Berk on make-believe play as the wellspring of self-regulation: how pretending teaches children to hold rules in mind, talk themselves through difficulty, and master their own impulses.
Dr. Laura Berk is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Psychology at Illinois State University and the author of child development textbooks used to train generations of teachers, psychologists and early years professionals. When the people who teach the teachers need a map of how children grow, Berk's books are very often the map. Her own research has two threads that turn out to be one: private speech, the muttered self-talk children use to steer themselves through a task, and make-believe play, the pretend worlds children build and then live inside.
That combination matters. Berk is not a commentator looking at play from the outside. She has spent a career recording what children actually say and do while they pretend, and her conclusion is one of the strongest claims anyone has made for an afternoon spent being a shopkeeper, a vet or a captain of an ark.
Berk's central claim, set out with her colleagues Trisha Mann and Amy Ogan in a chapter for the Oxford University Press volume Play = Learning, is that make-believe play is the wellspring from which self-regulation develops. Self-regulation is the quiet master skill of early childhood: the ability to manage your own attention, impulses, feelings and behaviour rather than being managed by them. It is what lets a child wait, persist, follow a plan and recover from frustration. And Berk's argument is that pretend play is not merely compatible with building it. Pretend play is where it gets built.
The logic runs through what pretending actually demands. A child playing shop is doing something cognitively strange and demanding: she is being two people at once, herself and the shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper comes with rules. Shopkeepers stand behind the counter. Shopkeepers take the money before handing over the goods. To stay in the game, the child must hold the role and its rules in mind and obey them, even when her own impulses pull the other way. The remarkable thing, as Berk and her colleagues argue in their chapter on make-believe play and self-regulation, is that the child does this voluntarily and with pleasure. Pretend play is the one arena where a small child willingly submits to rules, because the rules are the game.
Private speech is the visible machinery of this. Berk's research found that children use more of this self-directed talk during pretend scenarios than in other activities: narrating, instructing themselves, rehearsing what comes next. That muttering is not a quirk. In the tradition Berk works in, it is thought to be the bridge by which the regulation a child first receives from adults becomes regulation she can supply herself, spoken aloud at first and gradually turning inward into silent self-control. And the relationship appears to be graded: in this body of work, the richer and more sustained the pretend play, the stronger the self-regulation that goes with it. Complex, extended make-believe, with roles, plans and plots that survive longer than a minute, is the strong dose.
The source
Berk, Mann & Ogan (2006). Make-Believe Play: Wellspring for Development of Self-Regulation, in Play = Learning, Oxford University Press · Read the original
The first implication is a re-reading of behaviour parents see every day. A 3 year old solemnly telling her teddies they must wait for their tea is not just being sweet. She is practising the act of holding a rule and enforcing it, on herself as much as on the bears. A 4 year old muttering "no, the big one goes there" as he builds is not distracted; he is steering himself with language, which is precisely the skill that will one day let him sit through a phonics lesson. Berk's work asks parents to see pretend play and self-talk not as filler between learning, but as the learning.
The second implication is about what such play needs from adults: mostly time, a few open-ended props, and restraint. Rich make-believe takes a while to warm up. The first ten minutes are often negotiation, and the developmental gold, the sustained in-role play where the child is holding rules in mind, comes after that. Short scraps of time rarely get there.
Honesty requires the usual caveat. Much of the evidence linking pretend play to self-regulation is correlational: children who pretend richly also regulate well, and researchers are still working out exactly how much of that the play itself causes. Berk and her colleagues make a careful theoretical and empirical case, but no one should promise that a fortnight of shop play produces a measurably calmer child. What a parent can take with confidence is the direction of the argument: pretend play is exactly the kind of experience self-regulation grows from, it is free, children supply the motivation themselves, and there is no version of the evidence in which less of it would be better.
The toys that serve this research best are the ones that arrive without a script. A wooden ark with its pairs of animals does not tell a child what happens next. She decides the flood is coming, decides the elephants board first, decides the lion must wait his turn because those are the rules of her ark, and then, this is Berk's point, she obeys the rules she has just written. Listen at the door and you will hear the private speech running, a solemn voice, half narrator, half foreman. That is self-regulation being assembled out loud.
The same is true of a tea set laid out on the rug with all the ceremony of a state occasion. Tea parties have an order: pour, offer, wait, thank. A child hosting one for a parent and two rabbits is holding a whole sequence of social rules in mind and inhibiting every impulse to skip ahead, because skipping ahead would break the game. Shop play adds the arithmetic of goods and pennies changing hands in the proper order. Farm animals, ark animals, a basket of simple wooden toys → with no batteries, no sounds and no opinion of their own: these are the open-ended props from which children build the pretend worlds Berk studied, precisely because the toy contributes the object and the child must contribute everything else.
The contrast with most electronic toys is sharp. A toy that talks, lights up and runs the story has taken over the very jobs, planning, narrating, rule-keeping, that make pretend play rich. The plainness of a wooden animal is not nostalgia; it is the feature. Jaques of London, the world's oldest games company, has been making this kind of unscripted plaything since 1795, and the weight of a beech elephant in a 3 year old's hand still does what it has always done: it waits, silently, for the child to invent the rules.
The full chapter rewards reading; it sets out the theory and studies behind the wellspring claim: Make-Believe Play: Wellspring for Development of Self-Regulation (2006). On this site, our guide to pretend play turns the principle into ages, stages and prop ideas, open-ended toys explains why scriptless playthings do the heavy lifting, and the science page places Berk's work alongside the wider evidence on play and early development.
Quite the opposite. This is private speech, the self-directed talk Berk has spent much of her career studying, and in her account it is a sign of healthy development: the child is using language to plan, steer and control her own behaviour. Over the early school years it typically turns inward and becomes silent inner speech, the voice adults think with. Let it run, and resist the urge to answer it; it was never addressed to you.
In Berk's framework it is both, and the fun is load-bearing. Holding a role in mind, following the rules of a pretend scenario and resisting impulses that would break the game are direct practice in self-regulation, the skill set that underpins focus, patience and behaviour at school. Because the child chooses the game, she practises willingly and at length, which no worksheet achieves. The chapter's title states the position plainly: make-believe play is a wellspring for the development of self-regulation.
Sometimes, and lightly. Adults can enrich make-believe by accepting a role, adding a complication ("oh no, the shop has run out of apples") and then handing control straight back. What flattens the play is taking over: directing the plot, correcting the rules, or turning it into a quiz. The developmental work happens when the child is the one holding the scenario in mind, so the best supporting role is exactly that, a supporting role.
Open-ended ones: animal sets, arks, tea sets, play food, dolls, blocks, dressing-up bits, anything that can be ten things in ten games. The less a toy does, the more the child must do, and it is the child's contribution, the planning, narrating and rule-keeping, that builds self-regulation. Toys with scripts, sounds and fixed storylines tend to make the child a spectator of someone else's pretending rather than the author of her own.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.