Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time‐distributed, variable practice

Abstract

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75% White). Regardless of age, for every infant and time scale, across 10,015 object bouts, object interactions were short (median = 9.8 s) and varied (transitions among dozens of toys and non-toys) but consumed most of infants' time. We suggest that infant exuberant object play-immense amounts of brief, time-distributed, variable interactions with objects-may be conducive to learning object properties and functions, motor skill acquisition, and growth in cognitive, social, and language domains.

Joint engagement in the home environment is frequent, multimodal, timely, and structured

“…Perhaps, during moments of proximity, mothers' behaviors begin to converge on characteristics of joint engagement in structured tasks. Finally, we did not expect age-related changes in the duration of infant object bouts (Herzberg et al, 2021) and in the rates, forms, and latencies of joint engagement (Yu & Smith, 2017a). However, we expected base rates of proximity to change with infant age, with older infants being near their mothers less than younger infants.…”

“…Do features of joint engagement identified in structured tasks generalize to home settings? Frequent and timely bouts of joint engagement may be unlikely at home where infants transition from object to object quite quickly (Herzberg et al, 2021). Furthermore, dyad proximity likely fluctuates as mothers and infants move in and out of reach, creating challenges to bouts of joint touch.…”

Mothers talk about infants’ actions: How verbs correspond to infants’ real-time behavior.

“…Infants pull apart nesting cups, stack blocks, shake rattles, and pick up bites of cheese. Recent estimates suggest that infants spend upward of 60% of their daily routines at home manipulating toys and household objects (Herzberg et al, 2021). In contrast, whole-body actions may be variable in their implication of objects.…”

Milestones or Millstones: How Standard Assessments Mask Cultural Variation and Misinform Policies Aimed at Early Childhood Development

“…For example, the amount of motor experience after onset of a skill has been estimated by meticulously counting steps of infants who have recently begun to walk and those who have been walking for months (Adolph et al, 2012), and documenting every plaything encountered in infants who have been grasping objects for months (Herzberg et al, 2021). Only recently have new technologies begun to capture infants’ everyday experience and practice leading up to skill onset (Franchak, 2019; Franchak et al, 2021; Rosales et al, 2021).…”