Bruno Bettelheim's The Importance of Play: Games Ain't What They Used to Be

In his landmark work "The Importance of Play" Bruno Bettelheim lays out a penetrating study that attempts to describe the psychological importance that play has upon the development of the mind of young children. Bettelheim proceeds from the perspective of classic Freudian psychology with the suggestion that play is a method by which children are able to foster mature development by addressing issues of past psychological problems. Even the most seemingly mindless of playful activities therefore works as a royal road into their minds in which they can confront unconscious fears through their consciousness, not unlike an adult may do through role-playing in a psychologist's office.

According to Bettelheim, then, play is very much an intellectual activity. It is through playacting and imagination and role-playing that children can develop cognitive functions that may very well be applied specifically in adult versions of the very games they play. For instance, one of the first games that children seem to learn to play is store. One child plays the seller and the other plays the consumer. This kind of play spurs the development of a variety of cognitive skills that can be useful as an adult, from mathematical skills to learning how to sort according to size or color.

Using the same example, playing "store" also helps to develop less obvious skills that may be mirrored in real life adult situations. The children may play at a level in which bargaining or bartering takes place; perhaps as a result of imitating either their parents or something they saw on television. In this way children learn much-needed social skills such as how to compromise and how and how to judge what they are willing to give up in order to get what they need. Bettelheim makes the interesting observation that most of these kinds of skills area acquired at the subconscious level; that is the child learns them without being aware he is learning them.