Understanding and supporting the development of a child is an important obligation for all carers. The holistic approach to a child’s development seeks to simultaneously address the physical, linguistic, intellectual, social and emotional aspects of a child’s life. The important fact of the holistic approach is that the child is given the ability to learn different things at his/her different stages of development.
This essay will explore why play is important for the holistic development of a child, how playing has an impact on the child’s maturation and how play changes in the first six years of a child’s life.

Because of its multi-faceted nature and the fact that it is an intrinsically spontaneous and unpredictable phenomenon, ‘play’ has proved to be extremely difficult to define and research.
According to Bruce (1991), ‘play’ is a mechanism for learning, and is one of the most important dispositions to support children’s learning: ‘free-flow play seems to be concerned with the ability and the opportunity to wallow in ideas, experiences, feelings and relationships’ (Bruce, 1991, p42).While playing, children learn how to interact with peers, manage their feelings, explore the world and create new experiences. It can be argued that play helps the child’s cognitive development, which has been agreed upon by theorists, Vygotsky and Piaget. This learning through play will be disused further in the following pages of this thesis.
There seems to be a general difficulty to define what ‘Play’ is, and therefore as a result there have been numerous attempts to classify different types of Play.
Moyles (1989) argues that for every aspect of a child’s development, there is a form of play.
Each type of play has a main developmental and support aspect of physical, intellectual and social-emotional growth, and has main characteristics: play is child-chosen, is