Piaget’s Stages of Play, Explained by a Teacher Who Watched Them Happen

Every one of my four kids dropped a spoon off the side of the high chair, watched it land, and looked up at me to see what I’d do. Every one of them, years later, stood at the mud kitchen in our backyard and served me a “cake” made of dirt and rainwater with a very serious face. And every one of them, somewhere around seven, started caring intensely about whether the other person was cheating at cards.

Those three scenes are, more or less, Jean Piaget’s theory of play. He published it in French in 1945 and in English in 1962, and I taught high school for eleven years with his name on the syllabus of every education course I’d ever taken, and honestly I didn’t understand it until I watched it happen on my own kitchen floor. So if you searched for Piaget’s stages of play because a textbook or a parenting site made it sound complicated, let me give you the version I wish someone had given me.

The three stages of play Piaget actually described

Piaget described three kinds of play, and they show up in order: practice play, which runs from birth to roughly age two; symbolic play, roughly two to seven; and games with rules, from about seven on, though they start appearing earlier and, as any adult with a board game shelf knows, they never really stop.

You’ll see a lot of pages list four stages, with “constructive play” in the middle. That fourth one didn’t come from Piaget. It was added in 1968 by an Israeli researcher named Sara Smilansky, who was studying preschoolers and noticed that a whole category of what they did (building, stacking, making things) didn’t fit neatly into the other three. Most educators use her four-part version today, and I’ll cover it further down, but I think it’s worth knowing which ideas belong to whom, because the internet has quietly merged them and then attributed the whole thing to a man who died in 1980.

The other thing worth knowing up front is that these stages line up with Piaget’s better-known stages of thinking. Practice play belongs to the sensorimotor period, symbolic play to the preoperational one, and games with rules to the concrete operational stage and beyond. Piaget didn’t think of play as a break from development. He thought play was development, showing you from the outside what the mind was doing on the inside, which is the part I want to actually explain.

Practice play (birth to about two)

The spoon off the high chair is practice play. So is the baby who kicks the crib mobile forty times, the one who bangs two blocks together with total concentration, the toddler who climbs the same three stairs and comes back down and climbs them again.

Piaget’s word for what’s happening is assimilation. The child has a new ability (I can grip, I can let go, I can make a noise) and she runs it over and over for the pleasure of running it, the way you might drive a new car around the block for no reason. There’s no story yet and no goal beyond the doing. In the sensorimotor period, Angeline Lillard writes in her chapter on play for the Handbook of Child Psychology, the child “plays by exercising sensory and motor capacities on the environment,” and that is a very tidy way of describing what looks, from the parent’s side, like your baby throwing every single thing you hand her onto the floor.

I wrote a whole essay about that particular phase, because I think it’s the one most likely to be misread as defiance when it’s actually a child learning gravity. You can read it here. The short version is that a baby repeating an action isn’t stuck. She’s practicing, and the practice is the point.

Symbolic play (about two to seven)

Somewhere in the second year, and Lillard puts the average around nineteen months, a child does something that should stop you in your tracks the first time you see it: she picks up a block and holds it to her ear like a phone. Or she feeds a doll. Or she stirs an empty pot. One thing is standing in for another thing, and that is a completely new kind of thought.

This is symbolic play, and it’s the long middle of childhood: the pretend, the dress-up, the elaborate scenarios with rules that change every four minutes, the mud cake served to you with a straight face. Piaget saw it as the child bending the world to fit her own ideas (assimilation again, but now with imagination attached), and he thought it peaked in the preschool years and then slowly gave way to something more organized.

What I’d add, from the parent side, is that this is the stage we interrupt most. Symbolic play looks like nothing is happening. A kid alone in the yard talking to herself, or two siblings negotiating who gets to be the dog, doesn’t look like learning, so we schedule over it, or we jump in and start directing it, or we hand over a screen because the pretending has gotten loud. Most of us have done at least one of those. But this is where a child learns that a thing can mean something other than what it is, which is the foundation of reading, of math, and of every act of imagination she’ll ever perform. Our mud kitchen was never about mud. It was a bakery, a laboratory, a restaurant with terrible service, and I’ve written about why I let them get filthy in it here.

Games with rules (about seven and up)

Then something shifts. The rules stop changing every four minutes. A child starts to care, sometimes with alarming intensity, that the rules be fixed and followed by everyone, and that the person who breaks them face consequences. Welcome to games with rules, which Piaget saw as the play of the concrete operational stage: the age when a child can hold a rule in her head, apply it to herself and others, and understand that it exists outside of what she happens to want right now.

Lillard describes these games as “characterized by competition and established regulations,” and if that sounds a little cold, watch a group of eight-year-olds settle a dispute about whether the ball was in. It’s not cold… it’s moral philosophy conducted at full volume. And it never ends; chess, soccer, poker and the rules of the office are all games with rules, which is why Piaget considered this the only kind of play that persists into adulthood in its original form.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to, though. Games with rules don’t arrive on a birthday. They’re built out of the two stages before them, and you can watch the construction. I talk to a lot of parents of three-year-olds, and the thing I hear most often is some version of “she cannot lose a game of Candy Land.” Of course she can’t. A three-year-old is a symbolic player who has been handed a games-with-rules object. She isn’t being a sore loser; she’s being THREE, and the thirty-minute collapse over a lost turn is not a character problem to fix. It’s a developmental stage doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, with you nearby. (I wrote more about what actually matters at three here.)

Where constructive play came from

Smilansky’s addition, constructive play, is the building, drawing, stacking and making that starts in toddlerhood and runs right through the school years. She placed it between practice play and symbolic play developmentally, as the moment when a child stops just manipulating objects and starts using them to make something on purpose: a tower, a road, a fort, a very specific arrangement of rocks that must not be touched.

I include it because it’s useful, and because almost every list of “Piaget’s four stages” you’ll find online is actually Piaget’s three plus Smilansky’s one. If you’re a student writing about this, that distinction matters. If you’re a parent, what matters is that the block tower your four-year-old is building and rebuilding for an hour is not a waste of an afternoon. It’s the bridge between playing with a thing and playing with an idea.

Why this changes how you see your afternoon

None of this is a checklist, and I’d be careful of any version that turns it into one. The ages are rough, kids move back and forth between stages all day long (a nine-year-old can absolutely spend an hour in symbolic play with the right cousin), and Piaget himself was describing a sequence, not a schedule.

What the theory does, if you let it, is change what you see when you look at a child who appears to be doing nothing. The baby dropping the spoon is running an experiment. The five-year-old talking to nobody in the backyard is building the machinery she’ll read with. The eight-year-old arguing about whether the ball was in is learning what a rule is and why it applies to her too. Once you can see that, it gets much harder to interrupt, and much easier to protect the time.

One thing

This week, when you catch your kid in the middle of playing, don’t join and don’t redirect. Just name the stage in your head. Practice, symbolic, rules. Then give it ten more minutes than you were going to.

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I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Piaget J, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (Norton, 1962; French original 1945).
• Lillard AS, “The Development of Play,” in Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Vol. 2, 7th ed. (Wiley, 2015). PDF
• Smilansky S, The Effects of Sociodramatic Play on Disadvantaged Preschool Children (Wiley, 1968).