How children use pretend play to understand feelings, build relationships, and make sense of the world — through the DIR (Developmental, Individual Difference, Relationship) model
Symbolic play is when children use objects, words, images, or actions to represent something else — and in doing so, they process their deepest emotions
When a child plays Peter Pan, they're not just copying a movie. They're working through real feelings — fear, power, independence, and anxiety — in a safe space where they control the outcome.
The same character (a superhero, a princess, a pirate) means different things to different children. The symbol is infused with the child's unique emotions, experiences, and needs.
Every sensory experience is "dual coded" — the object or event is stored together with the emotion felt at the time. This emotional coding is what transforms perceptions into symbols.
By elevating raw feelings and impulses to the level of ideas expressed through play and words, children learn to regulate emotions and control behavior instead of acting out.
While children can play alone, symbolic play reaches its full power through back-and-forth interaction with a caring adult who follows the child's lead and expands their ideas.
Symbolic play simultaneously engages language, motor skills, cognition, social skills, and emotion — uniting what researchers often study separately into one integrated experience.
An integrated framework for understanding every child's development, created by Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder. Click each component to learn more.
Children build emotional and intellectual capacities in a sequence of Functional Emotional Developmental Levels (FEDLs). Each level builds on the one before, creating the foundation for all relating, communicating, and thinking:
Every child enters the world with a unique biological profile that shapes how they experience and respond to the world:
Relationships are the engine of development. The DIR model emphasizes:
Children progress through these developmental levels — each one building the foundation for the next. Click any step to learn more.
The infant learns to be calm, focused, and interested in the world. Parents support smooth cycles of sleep and alertness. Baby and caregiver begin sharing attention — the very first building block of all future relating and learning.
Infants and parents become increasingly intimate through looks, hugs, songs, and movement. A warm, trusting attachment forms — the foundation for all relationships in life. Over time, children must stay engaged across the full range of emotions, not just the pleasant ones.
Purposeful, continuous flows of back-and-forth interaction begin. Infants reach, vocalize, give and take objects, and use gestures to communicate desires and intentions. They become aware of the interpersonal world and their own bodies in space.
Toddlers learn to use social interactions to solve problems — like pulling a parent to the cookie cabinet. When old strategies fail, they discover new ones. They begin to differentiate their sense of self from others and develop thinking.
The birth of symbolic play! Toddlers pick up toy phones to call Daddy, set up tea parties, and examine sick baby dolls. Images form in their minds — they can now imagine objects and events without seeing them. Personal pretend dramas begin as they experiment with different roles and feelings.
Children begin combining ideas into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. They develop perspective-taking, use fantasy figures, and explore the need for power. Logical fantasies replace pure magical thinking as reasoning skills emerge.
Children develop the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, self from nonself, one feeling from another. They advance into multicausal thinking, gray-area reasoning, empathy, morality, and self-reflection — the highest rungs of the symbolic–emotional ladder.
As children climb the developmental ladder, the emotional themes they explore in play evolve in a predictable sequence
First symbols reenact being cared for and loved — all needs can be met
Themes of leaving, disappointment, loss, sadness, and first fears
Assertiveness, curiosity, exploring the wider world
Discovering "good guys" and "bad guys," confronting threats with magical powers
Control, defeating enemies, dealing with anger, jealousy, rivalry
Abstract themes: justice, compassion, understanding motives, multiple perspectives
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."— Albert Einstein
A critical insight from this paper: children with autism have more capacity for symbolic play than traditionally believed — when given the right support
Play in autism was described as simple, stereotypical, relying on sensory manipulation of toys, and lacking affect and theory of mind. Impaired symbolic play was even considered a symptom of ASD.
The DIR model shows that when intervention is tailored to each child's unique profile and promotes multiple forms of symbolic expression through interactive relationships, children with autism can climb the symbolic ladder.
Randomized controlled trials (Solomon et al., 2014; Casenhiser et al., 2014; Pickles et al., 2016) show that parent-mediated play interventions significantly reduce autism severity and advance developmental capacities.
128 children across 5 sites. Parents coached in play-based interactions showed large treatment effects for parent–child interactional behaviors and significant improvements on autism diagnosis measures. Mothers in the play group were less directive and less stressed.
RCT · 1 YearSignificant improvements in autism symptoms, social communication, and parent–child interactions. Children whose parents were coached in play outperformed the community treatment group in communicative acts.
RCT152 children with autism. Parent-mediated intervention significantly reduced autism severity scores. Children initiated more interactions and showed better language communication — effects persisted 6 years later.
RCT · 6-Year Follow-upFour composite case examples from the paper showing children with autism using symbolic play to advance emotionally. Click each card to read more.
At 4, Suzie has few words but can pretend to eat pizza and substitute objects. What matters most isn't the "functional play" skills — it's the flow of back-and-forth interaction, the thinking and feelings she shares with her mother, and her ability to recognize her mother's signals to self-regulate. These are the essential play experiences that build trust and emotional development.
Sam has fragmented language, feels lost in space, rarely moves from one spot, and is visually bound to the appearance of his toy figures. Yet he initiates a story about his deepest fears and persists in solving them. His mom doesn't correct or direct — she keeps the conversation going with affect cues, asks simple questions, and echoes his feelings. By age 7, Sam displays capacities for abstract thinking, empathy, and theory of mind.
When Daniel looks in the mirror dressed as a king, he becomes concerned and asks Dad to make the king disappear. Through magic words and play, he learns he can take on new roles while remaining himself. Later, he advances to more complex figures — asking the Genie to go into the magic lamp, and deciding Buzz Lightyear should go to jail for lying but then turning Buzz into a baby so he wouldn't have to stay.
A year later, Benny brings history into his play, explaining how the colonists won the Revolutionary War — then becomes distressed when he realizes many British soldiers died. He wonders if they should have shared the victory, full of compassion. By the civil war lessons, he uses logical and abstract thinking to understand the reasons for war. Symbolic play gave him a way to think through and understand history, literature, and his own emotional life.
This visualization shows how the emotional themes children explore in symbolic play become more complex as they develop. Hover over each bar to learn more.
Symbolic play isn't just cognitive — it's the primary way children process, understand, and regulate their deepest emotions.
Every experience is "dual coded" with emotion. This is how perceptions become symbols — the secret ingredient is affect.
Interactive play with attuned caregivers who follow the child's lead is what enables children to climb the symbolic ladder.
Children with autism can develop rich symbolic play when intervention is tailored to their unique profiles through the DIR model.
Negative emotions — fear, anger, jealousy — are just as important to symbolize as positive ones. Suppressing them hinders development.
Through symbolic play, children develop perspective-taking, theory of mind, abstract thinking, and moral reasoning.