Frequency and Duration of Play Participation Among Infants and Toddlers: A Cohort Study

INTRODUCTION: Play is a primary occupation for children. Play affords the opportunity for children to develop novel cognitive, motor, and social skills by providing an environment with minimal expectations or structure. Through play, important developmental milestones can also be identified and assessed. Current assessments used in occupational therapy focus on ability and skill acquisition of specific play behaviors. Gaps exist in the literature related to temporal play characteristics in infants/toddlers. The goal of this study was to expand our understanding of typical play by assessing the frequency and duration of different play behaviors of a cohort of infants/toddlers.

METHODS: Data came from a cohort of 16 parent/infant dyads and were collected longitudinally through hour-long recordings at 8, 12, and 16 months of age. Datavyu software was used to code the videos into different play. A coding scheme was developed to look at four categories of play: play type, play purpose, play object choice and play construction. A total of three raters (graduate research assistants in the Master of Occupational Therapy Program) were trained. The raters coded all four categories of play for each of the 16 participants. Intra- and inter-rater reliability was .90 across the three raters.

RESULTS: Overall, average duration and average frequency increased across all three ages for play object choice, play purpose, and play construction. Between the ages of 8 and 12 months, the cohort of infants/toddlers the average duration of play object choice almost doubled from 33 seconds per bout to over a minute. An accounting of this increase may be attributed to the infant/toddlers for fine and gross motor voluntary movements necessary to respond to stimulation and communication from a caregiver. Where the infants engagement in the skill of play construction may be attributed to the increased development with sensory discrimination, fine and visual motor skills, praxis, attention span, and gross motor skills, specific with independence in ambulation in order to obtain and engage with more interesting toys. Yet the decreased duration may be attributed to the infants/toddlers having increased mobility from creeping to crawling to standing and walking, thus spending more time moving around in lab space, seeking, obtaining and playing with different toys, objects and furniture. There was, however, and overall decrease in both average duration and frequency for play type as the infant/toddlers matured.

CONCLUSION: Observing play in a structured fashion in as little as a 20-minute sessions may assist in capturing the development of the contributing domains of development that make up the occupation of play. Inter-professional center based evaluations may also be a compressive way to observe developmental strengths and areas of improvement among the 0-3 population. Routine observation of typically developing infants and toddlers and how play evolves over time will support occupational therapy professionals to better imbed play among intervention plans, parental coaching sessions and home programing.

References

Parham, L. D., & Fazio, L. S. (2008). Play in occupational therapy for children (2nd Ed.). St. Louis, MO: Mosby Elsevier, 2008.

Knox, S. (1997). Development and current use of the Knox Preschool Play Scale. In L. D. Parham & L. S. Fazio (Eds.), Play in occupational therapy for children (pp. 35-51). St. Louis, MO: Mosby/Year Book.

American Occupational Therapy Association. (2014). Occupational therapy practice framework: Domain and process (3rd ed.). American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 68(Suppl. 1), S1– S48. http://dx.doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2014.682006