In Other Words: What Smothering All the Mash Potato with Gravy Is Really About

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The behaviour that looks like a problem but isn't

The mashed potato arrives on the plate. Within thirty seconds, the gravy has been distributed across every surface of it — methodically, completely, with great apparent satisfaction. The child surveys the result. Job done. Woe betide the sibling who snatched the gravy jug before their share was used and the mash was fully covered. The adult across the table tries to work out what just happened, why it mattered quite so much, and whether any of it constitutes a problem.

Every parent knows a version of this. The toddler who throws everything in sight. The three-year-old who wraps every small object she can find in tissue paper and hides it. The child who lines toys along a shelf in exactly the right order, goes ballistic when someone moves one, and starts all over again. The child who pours water from one cup to another, over and over, for twenty minutes solid, completely in their own world.

Most adults watching this think one of three things. The child is bored. The child is being awkward. Or — particularly with the lining up and the intense repetition — that something might actually be wrong and it might be time to talk to someone.

The research says something different. All of this behaviour has a name. It is called play schemas. And far from being a problem, it is exactly how young children's brains are supposed to work. This piece explains what schemas are, what the most common ones look like, why they sometimes get mistaken for something more serious, and which ones tend to cause the most grief at home.

What a schema actually is

The idea comes from a Swiss researcher called Jean Piaget, who spent decades in the mid-twentieth century watching children and writing down what they actually did. His key finding was simple but important: children do not just soak up information from the world around them. They actively build it. They test things, repeat things, and gradually construct an understanding of how everything works — through their own actions, not through being told.

A schema is one of those building blocks. It is a pattern of behaviour that a child returns to again and again because their brain is still working something out. When a two-year-old drops a spoon off a highchair tray and watches it fall, then does it again, and again, and again — they are not trying to be annoying. They are running an experiment. Does it fall every time? What about a feather? What about water? Each repetition is the child's brain collecting data.

Play schemas are these repeated patterns of play, each one focused on a different question about the world. How do things move? What happens when things are mixed together? What does it mean for something to be hidden? The child who throws everything is not aggressive. They are investigating how things travel through space. The child who fills and empties the same container fifty times is not aimless. They are working out volume and capacity. The child who wraps everything in tissue paper is not stealing. They are exploring what it means for something to be covered and concealed.

Researchers have identified around forty different schemas in total — each one a different area of the world a child is trying to understand. The eight that come up most often are explained below.

The eight most common schemas — and what they look like

Trajectory. Throwing, dropping, rolling, watching things fly. The child is figuring out how things move through space — speed, direction, gravity. This is the schema most likely to get a child told off, because throwing things indoors is dangerous and annoying. But the child is not being naughty. They are being a scientist.

Rotation. Spinning things, turning things, watching wheels go round. Also spinning themselves until they fall over. The child is exploring how circular movement works. When this one is intense, it can worry people — more on that below.

Enclosure and containment. Building walls and fences around things, putting objects inside other objects, climbing inside boxes. The child is working out what it means for something to have a boundary — inside versus outside, contained versus free. Children deep in this schema can get very upset if someone dismantles their enclosures.

Transporting. Moving things from one place to another. Filling a bag, carrying it across a room, emptying it, going back for more. Over and over. This is the one that empties drawers, strips shelves, and moves everything to somewhere it should not be. The child is not making a mess deliberately. They are exploring movement, quantity, and the logic of getting things from A to B.

Connection. Joining things together — train tracks, string, sticky tape, anything that links two things. Disconnecting is just as important as connecting. Taking things apart is not destruction. It is investigation.

Transformation. Mixing things, combining things, changing what something looks like. Mixing paint colours, pouring liquids together, smearing things on surfaces. This one produces the most mess. The child is fascinated by change — what happens when things combine or are acted upon.

Positioning. Arranging objects in precise order. Lining things up, sorting by colour or size, creating configurations that must not be disturbed. This schema can look, to an uninformed eye, like something more concerning — which is explained below.

Enveloping. Covering things, wrapping things, hiding things — and hiding themselves. This is the one that causes the most misunderstanding at home, and it gets its own section below.

When schemas get mistaken for something more serious

This is where it gets important. Two schemas in particular tend to set alarm bells ringing — in parents, in health visitors, in GPs, even in specialists — when the child is actually just fine.

The first is the positioning schema. A child who lines things up in very precise order, gets extremely upset if someone moves anything, and goes back to reassemble the arrangement immediately can look, to someone who does not know about schemas, like they might be showing early signs of autism. The behaviour has some surface similarities to the repetitive, rigid patterns associated with autism spectrum conditions. And that is enough — quite understandably — to make parents and professionals want answers.

What the research shows is that intense positioning behaviour is entirely normal in children aged one to three. It is what children in this schema do. The difference is in what happens next. Schema-driven positioning behaviour tends to shift and broaden as the child moves on to new questions. The kind of rigid, repetitive behaviour associated with autism tends to intensify rather than diversify. That distinction is important — but it takes knowledge of schemas to even know it exists.

The second is the rotation schema. A child who spins constantly — themselves, toys, anything that turns — and seems unusually absorbed by circular motion can prompt concern about sensory processing issues or other neurodevelopmental differences. Again, context is everything. Intense rotation behaviour is common and normal in toddlers. It runs its course.

The problem is not that parents worry. Of course they worry. The problem is that professionals who have never heard of schemas may take that worry and run with it — generating referrals, assessments, and a great deal of parental anxiety over behaviour that sits well within the normal range. A GP, a school SENCO, a health visitor who understands schemas is in a much better position to give accurate reassurance than one who does not. Schema awareness should not be a specialist subject. It should be basic knowledge for anyone who works with children under five.

The schemas that cause the most trouble at home

Some schemas do not get mistaken for clinical issues — they just cause chaos. Throwing things, pouring things everywhere, carrying everything from one room to another — these are annoying and sometimes dangerous, but they are at least recognisable as ordinary toddler behaviour. The enveloping schema is different. It looks deliberate. It looks deceptive. And it causes a particular kind of upset that is worth understanding.

The enveloping schema is the drive to cover, wrap, and conceal things. A child in this schema wraps toys in fabric, buries objects in sand, tucks things under cushions, hides items in bags and drawers, and covers their own face or body and finds it deeply satisfying. The cognitive interest is in what it means for something to be hidden — the shift from visible to invisible, present to absent.

The trouble starts when the objects being enveloped belong to someone else and matter to them. Grandma's reading glasses, found wrapped in a tea towel in a drawer. Car keys buried under a sofa cushion. A sibling's favourite toy sealed inside a carrier bag. The adult's version of this is obvious: the child took something valuable, hid it, and cannot explain why. It looks like deception. It looks like theft.

It is neither. The child did not choose the object because it was valuable. They chose it because it was there and it could be covered. They have no idea why anyone is upset. The gap between what the adult thinks happened and what actually happened is total — and that gap is where all the conflict lives.

The same schema produces the child who pulls a blanket over their head in a room full of people and gets furious when an adult lifts it off. That is not anxiety. It is not defiance. It is a child who is doing exactly what they were doing with the car keys — exploring the experience of being covered and concealed — and who has just been interrupted mid-experiment.

What tends to help is not stopping the schema but redirecting it. Give the child things that can be freely wrapped and hidden — fabric scraps, boxes, bags, objects that do not matter. The schema still runs. It just runs on materials that do not cause a family crisis.

Schemas do not just stop when childhood ends

Here is something the research raises that most people have never considered. These early patterns of play do not necessarily disappear when a child grows up. They change shape. They become more sophisticated. But for many people, the dominant schema of early childhood quietly becomes the dominant interest of adult life.

The child who was obsessed with lining things up and arranging collections may become the adult who cannot leave a disorganised shelf alone, who reorganises the kitchen cupboards for pleasure, who finds a deep and slightly inexplicable satisfaction in getting things into the right order. The child who could not stop joining things together may become the person who builds things for a living, or who finds that connecting ideas and systems comes naturally in a way they cannot fully account for. The child who was fascinated by mixing and transforming things may end up as a cook, a chemist, or just someone for whom the transformation of materials never loses its appeal.

People often describe these activities as producing a satisfaction that seems bigger than the task warrants. Absorbed. Warm. Right. What the research suggests is that this feeling has very deep roots — going back to a time before the person could speak, before they had any conscious memory, when the brain was first building its understanding of the world and the schema was the tool it used. The adult does not remember any of that. They just know it feels like theirs.

What schemas change

Once schemas are understood, the behaviour of young children starts to look very different. The child throwing things is not being aggressive. The child who has buried the car keys is not being deceptive. The child arranging toys in precise rows and crying when they are moved is not displaying clinical symptoms. They are all working. Building. Asking questions about the world in the only language available to them at that age — physical, repeated action.

That knowledge matters for professionals too. Any doctor, nurse, teacher or support worker who encounters young children and does not know about schemas is at risk of misreading entirely normal behaviour as cause for concern. It happens. Children get referred. Parents get frightened. Assessments are begun for children who are developing exactly as they should. Schema literacy is not a specialist topic for early years experts. It is basic knowledge that anyone working with under-fives should have.

For parents and carers, schemas do not make every difficult day easier. A child in an intense transporting phase is still going to empty every drawer in the house. But understanding why changes how it feels to be on the receiving end. Instead of "what is wrong with this child," the question becomes "what are they working on." That is a different question — and it tends to lead somewhere much more useful.

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Topics: #InOtherWords #PlaySchemas #EarlyChildhoodDevelopment #SchemaTheory #ChildDevelopment #EarlyLearning #ParentingKnowledge #EarlyYears #Misdiagnosis #DevelopmentalPsychology #Piaget #ChrisAthey #YoungFamilyLife

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Related YFL Content

Play — the Brain's Natural Learning — The broader picture of why play matters neurologically, within which schema development sits as a specific and central mechanism.

In Other Words: Why Children Lie — Another piece where children's behaviour looks morally significant to adults and turns out to be developmentally ordinary — with direct relevance to the enveloping schema and the appearance of concealment.

The Three-Pound Supercomputer — The architecture of the brain that schema play is building: what is happening neurologically when young children repeat the same action forty times.

Learning to Survive — How the Brain Navigates Opportunity and Danger — How the brain's early experiences shape its long-term architecture, and why the quality of the exploratory environment in early childhood matters beyond the play years.