Child’s Play: Play as an Informal, Relational Curriculum of Childhood

This chapter explores play as an informal curriculum of childhood and proposes that it is a social practice that children engage with and learn how to be and become children. Taking a sociological perspective, this chapter explores the ways that play is a vital aspect of children’s socialization, a concept reframed from passive process to active engagement. Play is framed as a social dynamic which differentiates children from adults, and as a process through which children learn to inhabit the social position of childhood. Inspired by Bourdieu’s ideas of practice and habitus, and drawing on a study conducted by the author exploring children and parents’ perspectives of childhood, this chapter makes a case for understanding play as an embodied, nonrational, informal, and relational practice – a form of social learning through which children take on the behaviors and boundaries of the social category of childhood, while also experimenting and improvising within those bounds. Ideas of play as informal learning, play as dialogue, and play as a means for children to participate in active socialization are also explored.