No Child’s Play: Reconceptualizing Children’s Play as Caregivers’ Work

• In Event: Sociology of Development Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Development & Gender

Abstract

Play is often theorized as an expressive activity opposed to work, presumed to arise spontaneously from children’s intrinsic motivation. This framing obscures the social organization of play and the labor required to produce and sustain it. This paper advances a conceptual displacement that reframes play as work from the standpoint of caregivers, treating play as a productive process rather than a residual category outside labor. Drawing on feminist theories of social reproduction, sociological accounts of relational and affective labor, and semiotic approaches to meaning-making, we argue that play is analytically incomplete without attention to the relational, grooming, semiotic, and fabricating labor performed by caregivers. Using qualitative cases from an Early Childhood Development intervention in the Global South, we show how play is actively produced through everyday practices that cultivate capacities later recognized as human capital. While grounded in Southern contexts, this framework is analytically portable, reorienting understandings of play everywhere.

Authors

• Paromita Sanyal, Florida State University

• Erlfang (Eleanor) Tsai, University of California, Berkeley

• Emanuela Galasso, The World Bank

• Lia C.H. Fernald, University of California, Berkeley

• Tsirery C. Randriamiarisoa