Development Studies Commons^™

Exploring Parent-Child Interactions During Natural Spatial Play, Nicole Oppenheimer

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Spatial skills develop continuously throughout life. One way for young children to improve spatial skills is by working together with a more knowledgeable person such as a parent. When parents use spatial language during play, they bring attention to the spatial information on and around the target object, which subsequently promotes spatial skills in children (Cartmill et al., 2010; Pruden et al., 2011; Pruden & Levine, 2017). In the past, most research on the development of spatial skills was conducted in highly structured laboratory settings. While laboratory studies are useful because they allow researchers to control circumstances that can introduce …