The significance of parental mentalizing for four-year-old children's solitary pretend play

De-identified data set necessary to replicate the findings reported in our study "The significance of parental mentalizing for four-year-old children’s solitary pretend play".

Abstract

Background. Pretend play is a signature behavior of early childhood and is considered to reflect the child’s emerging symbolic function, enabling the interpretation of social signals, language development, and emotion understanding. While theory links parental mentalizing with children’s pretend play, only a few studies have investigated this association. These studies are limited to infancy and toddlerhood, and child pretend play is assessed during play with an adult (social play). Based on the assumption that child solitary pretend play reflects the child’s ‘baseline’ pretend play ability, in this study, we investigate children’s pretend play at its peak, i.e., during the preschool age without the facilitation of another player. The overall objective was to investigate if parental mentalizing increases pretend play complexity in children.

Methods. The sample consisted 99 Danish mothers and their 4-year-old children. Employing a cross-sectional design, we hypothesized that parental mentalizing during interaction with the child ('online' mentalizing) is a mechanism through which parental reflective functioning ('offline' mentalizing) is associated with child solitary pretend play. Child pretend play complexity was observed and coded with an adapted version of the 12-Step Play Scale. Maternal offline mentalizing was assessed with the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire, and maternal online mentalizing was assessed by coding the mothers’ use of mental state language during interaction with the child using the Mind-mindedness approach.

Results. While there was no direct effect of maternal offline mentalizing on child pretend play, online mentalizing mediated the link between offline mentalizing and child pretend play.

Conclusions. These results provide support for the theoretically assumed link between parental mentalizing and children’s capacity for pretend play. Furthermore, our study contributes to the literature on parental mentalization, suggesting that parental mentalizing facilitates child development only if the parent can translate this ability into 'mentalizing in action'.