Eating Prickly Peas: Sharing Play Worlds During Preschool Meals

The study explores how children use play involving food to create and share imaginative universes during meals in kindergarten. The study investigates how this play with food is integrated into mealtime situations and influences children’s interactions with both kindergarten teachers and other children. In addition, the purpose is to understand how kindergarten teachers’ reactions and support can promote a balance between play and institutional requirements regarding mealtime routines.

The results show that playing with food gives children the opportunity to initiate imaginative and creative interactions. The kindergarten teachers often responded positively to children’s play signals, and actively engaged in further developing the actions of the play. This contributed to a more relaxed and social atmosphere around the table, while also balancing the structural requirements of the meal. The study highlights that play during meals does not cause disruption, but can contribute to children’s social development and well-being.

The data collection was carried out using video recordings from 97 meals in four Swedish kindergartens, and amounts to around 68 hours of recording. The data were analysed using multimodal interaction analysis, which included observation of facial expressions, body language, voice usage, and other communicative signals. Through the analysis, the researchers were able to investigate how food was used as a representation of play and how this play was initiated and developed in interaction between children and kindergarten teachers during mealtimes.

Wiggins, S., Willemsen, A., & Cromdal, J. (2023). Eating Prickly Peas: Sharing Play Worlds During Preschool Meals. International Journal of Early Childhood, 1–18.