Fantastical play and the potential for enhanced thinking skills

Scientists are researching fantasy play and the effect it can have on a child’s cognitive and creative abilities. They are investigating if pretend play, and particularly ‘fantastical pretend-play', helps children to develop their executive function skills: those that help us to think and solve problems.  

Typically, children start their imaginative play based on real experiences; as a toddler they might have made a cup of tea or pretended to be a family pet. 

Those early imaginative days of being someone else or an animal or bird set the foundations for imaginative play and gave your child time to learn about themselves, as well as others.  

Fantastical play potentially extends thinking from everyday imaginary play into a whole new world of seemingly unimaginable ideas. 

We love the phrase ‘fantastical pretend-play’; it conjures up images of Heston’s amazing food creations or a world full of amazing imaginary friends.  

Fantasy play takes the idea of imaginative play a little further: children enter a make-believe world where non-real characters, like gnomes and unicorns, start appearing. To take it a step further and make play fantastical, the characters play out fantasy events, such as flying on a magic carpet.^[1] 

Even though it is not fully understood yet, scientists think that when children enter a non-real world, their ability to think in different ways is enhanced.^[2]  

It is thought that entering non-real and fantastical pretend play encourages your child to use more complex thinking skills. 

This is because entering a fantastical world takes the imagination to another dimension, and to do this, a child must have good language skills and a strong cognitive ability.  

They no longer rely on their memory of real events to create their play, but instead produce ideas that cannot happen in the real world.  

A study in 2020 found that most children need support to achieve fantastical thinking. 

As with most things in life, children need lots of different experiences in order to grow and develop. Fantastical play is no exception, and without exposure to non-real beings and events, a child is unlikely to be able to open their minds and think in a different way.^[1] 

Spending a little time with your child reading stories, watching programmes together and joining in their play can help bring inspiration and ideas into play – you might find your child is a dinosaur one day and a flying lion the next!   

Children whose parents encouraged fantasy were found to have more creative thinking processes.^[1] 

So, let the unicorns fly and the trolls sing in unison. Nothing is unimaginable with fantastical thinking. 

References: 

[1] Bunce, L., Woolley, J.D. (2021) Fantasy orientation and creativity in childhood: A closer look. Cognitive Development, Volume 57, 2021, 100979’. 

[2] Thibodeau, R.B, Gilpin, A.T, Brown, M.M. & Meyer, B.A. (2016) The effects of fantastical pretend-play on the development of executive functions: An intervention study. Journal of experimental child psychology, 145, pp. 120-138.