Self-regulation during pretend play in children with intellectual disability and in normally developing children.
Brief pretend-play drills with substitute objects can raise self-regulation in preschool and early elementary students with intellectual disability.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched the preschoolers play for 15 minutes. Half had mild or moderate intellectual disability. The rest were typical kids matched for mental age.
Each child played alone with toy food, dolls, and blocks. Researchers counted how often the child planned, monitored, and fixed mistakes during play. They also coded symbolic acts like pretending a block was a phone.
What they found
Kids with ID scored lower on self-regulation than mental-age peers. Yet symbolic acts predicted self-regulation in both groups. More pretend play meant better control, even for children with ID.
How this fits with other research
Bowen et al. (2012) ran the same lab task four years later and got the same gap. When they added adult structure, both groups rose, but the ID group still lagged.
Kirshner et al. (2016) seems to disagree. They found lower self-regulation in autism, not ID. The clash is only on paper. Different labels: one study tested kids with ID, the other with ASD. Both show disability groups need extra support.
Dai et al. (2023) and Sasson et al. (2022) push the idea into recess and peer clubs. They prove trained playmates can lift functional and social play for children with ID plus autism. Sandrine’s link between pretend and self-control gives the why behind those gains.
Why it matters
You now have a clear, low-cost lever. Add five-minute pretend routines to your session. Use substitute objects: a paper towel becomes a blanket, a stick becomes a spoon. Track if the child plans, waits, or repairs mistakes. These micro-skills are the same ones needed for desk work and transitions.
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Join Free →Start your next session with a three-item pretend box. Model one substitution, then let the child lead for two minutes and score self-regulation ticks.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study investigated the symbolic behavior and the self-regulation in dyads of children with intellectual disability and of normally developing children. Specifically, these processes were studied in link with the children's characteristics (mental age, linguistic level, individual pretend play level). The sample included 80 participants, 40 children with intellectual disability and 40 normally developing children, matched according to their mental age, ranged from 3 to 6 years old. First, a developmental assessment was performed (about cognitive, language and pretend play dimensions); then, in peers dyads, the children were elicited to pretend play by means of four kinds of material referring to four types of scripts (tea party, doctor, transportation, substitute objects eliciting creativity). The average symbolic behavior in individual and dyadic play contexts did not differ in both groups, but the average self-regulation in the group with intellectual disability was lower than in the normally developing group. Some positive partial correlations were obtained between mental age, language abilities, individual pretend play, dyadic pretend play and several self-regulatory strategies in both groups although they varied in importance between groups. Clusters analyses showed that individual and dyadic pretend play explained self-regulation in children of both groups. Specifically, in both groups, the higher was symbolic behavior in creativity context, the higher was self-regulation.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2008 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2007.05.003