Describe three important changes in make-believe play that reflect a preschool child's growing symbolic mastery

What will be an ideal response?

In early pretending, toddlers use only realistic objects. Their earliest pretend acts usually imitate adults' actions and are not yet flexible. They have trouble using an object that already has an obvious use as a symbol of another object. Furthermore, make-believe is directed toward the self, rather than toward others. As children grow, we see three important changes that reflect their growing symbolic mastery:
1. Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. After age 2, children play with less realistic toys. Gradually, they can imagine objects and events without any support from the real world. And by age 3, they flexibly understand that an object may take on one fictional identity in one pretend game and another fictional identity in a different pretend game.
2. Play becomes less self-centered. Young children direct pretend actions toward other objects, as when a child feeds a doll. Early in the third year, children become detached participants, making a doll feed itself or pushing a button to launch a rocket. Increasingly, preschoolers realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves.
3. Play includes more complex combinations of schemes. Preschoolers combine schemes with those of peers in sociodramatic play, the make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood. By the end of early childhood, children have a sophisticated understanding of role relationships and story lines.