________ has special importance in the social development of the child.

Concept — Social development means the growth of a child's ability to live and work with other people: sharing, taking turns, cooperating, following and negotiating rules, settling disputes and taking up different roles. Educational psychology treats these as skills that can be acquired only through direct, two-way interaction, because a social skill has to be practised on a partner who responds.

Application — Among the influences named in this question, play is the child's own spontaneous, self-chosen group activity, and it is the earliest and most frequent situation in which that two-way interaction actually takes place. In a group game the child has to divide roles, wait for a turn, accept a common rule, adjust to a partner's move and settle a quarrel on the spot, and these are exactly the behaviours that make up social development. Piaget's study of how children handle the rules of a game, and Vygotsky's account of play as the setting in which a child behaves beyond his everyday level, both describe play as the child's first social laboratory. So the blank is filled by play.

Cross-check — how the other influences act:

• Child literature reaches the child as a reader or listener, so its main contribution is to vocabulary, imagination and moral ideas rather than to give-and-take with a companion.

• Daily routine is a fixed timetable of waking, meals, study and sleep, so it builds punctuality, regularity and self-discipline, which are personal habits.

• Media transmits information and models of behaviour to the child as an audience, so it widens exposure and shapes attitudes, but supplies no responding partner to practise a social skill on.

Result — The blank is completed by play, because it is the one influence here that keeps the child in continuous give-and-take with other children, which is the mechanism of social development.