Paternal play with toddlers: Recreation and creation

The purpose of the paper is threefold. First, it presents empirical data about paternal and maternal games displayed with toddlers in a play situation with polyvalent objects. Both parents proposed predictable routines through conventional games. But differences in parental games also occurred, as fathers proposed new ways of using the objects through non conventional games more than mothers did. Second, those results are interpreted in terms of paternal specific contributions to development. In fact, in such play situations with toddlers, paternal behaviors are more destabilizing than maternal ones. Last, we discuss whether paternal irregularities in such play situation with objects may favor cognitive development, as well as structurant maternal regularities in the same situation. More generally, the complementary contributions of maternal and paternal perturbations in different kind of situations (play, language development) are questioned.