Yes, mostly, and you can keep the play kitchen. Montessori leans hard toward real activities over fantasy ones, and there is a decent reason for it: when researchers offered preschoolers the choice between doing a thing and pretending to do it, the children overwhelmingly picked the real one. What follows from that is an invitation into your kitchen. Nobody has to put a toy on the curb.
Most parents arrive at this question already feeling told off, usually by a photograph of somebody else's beige shelf. The actual disagreement is much narrower than that photograph suggests, so it is worth setting out before you decide you have broken a rule.
Where the discomfort with pretend play comes from
A Montessori classroom usually has no dressing-up corner and no fairy castle. What it has instead is a shelf of small real things: a jug that pours, a brush that sweeps up an actual mess, fruit that gets cut and then eaten. The method treats a young child's serious interest in adult work as the main event, and assumes fantasy will arrive on its own without any help from the furniture.
Somewhere between that and the internet, a preference hardened into a prohibition. You will read that Montessori bans pretend play, that plastic kitchens are out, that unicorns are a developmental error. That is a much bigger claim than the practice supports, and it is why a lot of parents feel caught out by their own living room.
The fair version of the argument was put in print in 2019 by Lillard and Taggart, in a paper called "Pretend Play and Fantasy: What if Montessori Was Right?" Note the question mark. Both authors argue for that answer, so read the paper as a case being made.
What happened when children were offered both
The comparison people usually run is Montessori against imagination, which is unwinnable and slightly silly. The narrower comparison is the useful one: the pretend version of an activity against the real version of the same activity. Somebody ran that one.
In 2018, Taggart, Heise and Lillard published a study in Developmental Science. They offered 100 children nine activities, each in a real form and a pretend form. The children averaged just under five years old, the youngest three and the oldest nearly seven. I would like to tell you which nine. The full paper sits behind a paywall I could not get through, so I am working from the abstract and will not fill that gap with plausible-sounding examples.
In the authors' own words, the children "overwhelmingly preferred real activities to pretend ones," and "this preference increased from age 3 to age 4, then remained steady through age 6." I quote because the percentages are behind that same paywall, and a number I half-remember from somebody else's blog post is worth nothing to you.
Hold the finding loosely. One hundred children, described in the paper as American middle-class preschoolers, in one lab, choosing between activities that had been laid out for them. It tells you what children reach for. What either kind of play does for them afterwards is a separate question this study does not touch.
Both sides are claiming more than they can show
Two claims get made here, one from each direction, and both are weaker than the people making them admit.
- "Young children can't tell real from pretend." Woolley and Ghossainy reviewed this in Child Development in 2013 and came out somewhere else entirely, describing children as naive skeptics who, when judging whether something is real, are "as likely to doubt as they are to believe." Doubting too readily is a different problem, and clearing the fantasy off a shelf does nothing about it.
- "Pretend play is essential to development." The evidence there is thinner than the confidence with which it gets said. A 2013 review in Psychological Bulletin, by Lillard and five colleagues, found that "existing evidence does not support strong causal claims about the unique importance of pretend play for development." Three comments were published alongside it in the same issue, which tells you how settled the field considers itself.
Both purists end up holding less than they think. Stripping fantasy out of a house and mandating an hour of imaginative play a day are claims that outrun what anyone can currently show. The honest rule of thumb is that nobody knows enough to make you feel guilty.
A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.
Lev VygotskyMind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, trans. Michael Cole (Harvard University Press, 1978), ch. 7, "The Role of Play in Development," p. 100
Let your child into the real kitchen
The move that follows from the Taggart study costs nothing. If children mostly reach for the real job when both are on offer, hand over some of the real job.
Open the dishwasher and watch what happens. Long before anyone teaches a toddler to help, most of them arrive at that door within a few seconds and start unloading it in the wrong order. That pull is what the study caught in a lab, and it turns up in your kitchen at half past six whether you asked for it or not.
- Give one job away completely. Peeling the eggs, washing the lettuce, carrying a plate to the sink: one job that belongs to your child from start to finish. The completeness is most of what makes it worth doing.
- Small real tools, if you have them. A child's knife that actually cuts a banana. A jug light enough to lift when it is full. Your own kitchen drawer usually supplies these before a shop does, and some of the same idea sits on the practical life shelf.
- It has to end in something. The bread gets eaten. The plant gets watered. The floor is visibly less sticky than it was ten minutes ago. A real job has a result, and the result is half the appeal.
- Cracking eggs costs you eggs. Pick a morning when that will not make you snap.
- Hand work for the rest of the day. You cannot cook all day and your child cannot help all day. Threading, pouring and pinching are the same movements in a form that runs without you standing over it, which is what the fine motor shelf is for.
Keep the play kitchen
Nothing above is a reason to get rid of it. If your child would love a play kitchen, that is a sufficient reason to buy one. Enjoyment does not need a developmental justification, and a toy shop that tells you a wooden thing will make your child smarter is selling you something.
The dragons stay too. A four-year-old narrating a battle between a wooden spoon and a small horse is doing fine. The research on what that play builds is unsettled, and unsettled cuts both ways: nobody can promise you it is essential, and nobody can tell you it is a wasted afternoon.
What I would change is the order. Real job first, because that is what most children in that study picked when both were on the table. Then the pretend version, whenever it comes. A play kitchen that gets used after a child has been let into the real one tends to be a busier place, though that is our impression from talking to parents and not something anyone has tested.
When to stop worrying about this
The age pattern is the part of the study I would actually keep. The preference for real activities sharpened between three and four, then held steady through six. The question largely answers itself, on a schedule you are not in charge of.
Under three, my guess is that a child is not weighing real against pretend in any considered way, and I want to be clear that it is a guess: the study's youngest child was three. What you see at that age is carrying, filling, tipping and mouthing, and a pot is a pot whether or not it has ever held soup. That is roughly the whole brief for babies and one-year-olds. From around three the pull toward the real job gets stronger, and that is usually the age a parent notices their child hovering at the counter while the toy stove sits cold. We keep a shelf for three-year-olds, and at that age the counter is free and better.
The fantasy-forward side of this deserves more than the paragraph I have given it. That argument is the Montessori and Waldorf comparison, which has its own post here.
One thing this week, then. Pick a job you currently do at speed and hand it over: the lettuce, the eggs, the plate that goes to the sink. Expect it to take four times as long and to finish with a wiped floor. The play kitchen stays where it is and the dragons stay in it. The hard part is standing there while a three-year-old washes one leaf.
Where this came from
- Taggart, J., Heise, M. J., & Lillard, A. S. (2018). The real thing: preschoolers prefer actual activities to pretend ones. Developmental Science, 21(3), e12582. One hundred children described as American middle-class preschoolers, in a single lab, choosing between activities laid out for them; the full text and its percentages sit behind a paywall we could not get through, so this post quotes the abstract's own wording and does not name which nine activities were used.
- Lillard, A. S., Lerner, M. D., Hopkins, E. J., Dore, R. A., Smith, E. D., & Palmquist, C. M. (2013). The impact of pretend play on children's development: A review of the evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1-34. A review of other researchers' studies rather than new data, and a contested one: three comments on it were published in the same issue, followed by the authors' reply at pages 49-52.
- Woolley, J. D., & Ghossainy, M. E. (2013). Revisiting the fantasy-reality distinction: Children as naive skeptics. Child Development, 84(5), 1496-1510. A review of how children judge whether claims are real, not a study of play, so it undercuts one popular argument without settling what belongs on a shelf.
- Lillard, A. S., & Taggart, J. (2019). Pretend play and fantasy: What if Montessori was right? Child Development Perspectives, 13(2), 85-90. An argument piece by researchers who favor that conclusion, one of them an author of the 2018 study; read it as a position rather than a finding.
- The practical suggestions in this post rest on nobody's study. No trial has tested handing a young child a real kitchen job, and we are not going to imply one has; that section is our own judgment, formed from the preference finding above and from what parents tell us, and it is labeled that way in the text. The same goes for the guess about under-threes, whose age group the 2018 study did not include.
