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Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

Pretend play Part 5 is coming at you.

Part 5 of 5.

This one originally published 123, 2025.

Let's have it.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the fifth.

And for now, the final part in our series on pretend play.

Now, sometimes when we do a longer series like this, we say, you know, devour in whatever order you like. But this really is one series where we do recommend listening in order, because today we're going to build on and refer back to stuff we talked about in some earlier episodes from this series. But to refresh briefly in those earlier parts, we talked about definitions and subdivisions of pretend play, play that involves non-literal action and understanding.

We talked about which aspects of pretend play appear to be universal and which appear to be culturally variable.

For example, the evidence is pretty strong that all children around the world engage in pretending,

even in environments where it is actively discouraged,

and it emerges on a pretty consistent developmental schedule, though there is wide variation

across cultures and within cultures across like home conditions and different types of

parental influence, in how much time children spend on pretend play play and in what its themes and contents are.

Some cultures have more fantasy themes like talking animals. Others are more realism bound in

their pretend games and so forth. We also talked about the specific issue of imaginary companions,

where those come from, how they usually work, what patterns manifest within and across cultures. We talked about possible links between pretend play and complex cognitive skills like symbolic understanding, counterfactual reasoning, and theory of mind, whether pretend to play may help children develop these capabilities or whether it makes use of common neural

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