Playing House with a 6-Year-Old Girl

Last week I spent three days at a local kindergarten. Although my focus was on preschoolers’ cognitions of Japan and foreign countries, I encountered one fascinating episode that could reveal the development of domain differentiation among them.

E: “Hiro, let’s play house. I am mother. You are father.”
H: “Sure.”
(E kisses my right cheek.)
E: “Okay, we are married now!”
(E puts a doll in between her belly and shirt.)
E: “I am going to have a baby. We will need an operation!”
(E then asks the other girl S to operate on her.)
H: “But, I think a baby can be born without an operation.”
E: “No, no. We need an operation.”
(E starts giving S instructions. S then uses toy knives and folks as surgical instruments.)
E: “Oh, a baby is born!
(E exclaims as she brings the doll out of her shirt.)
S: “Let’s give the baby milk.”
(S tries to hand a toy bottle of milk to E. But E refuses it.)
E: “No, the baby cannot drink it yet. I must breastfeed her.”
And so on.

As I have observed 2nd and 6th graders, I suspect that differentiation between social and biological domains occurs earlier among girls than boys. My hypothesis is that girls’ plays (like the house play above) tend to incorporate social and biological themes more often than boys’ plays and therefore encourage girls to develop cognition to differentiate and coordinate social and biological domains in human life.