Julie indicates that she enjoys playing with her children and likes to get involved, "Like we'll play house and I'll be the baby." In the videotaped interaction, Julie's two youngest children play a charades board game with her. For the entire game, Julie sits planted on the floor, even for her turns to act out an action, changing the position of her legs only once. When her turns come, she uses just her arms for the actions. In contrast, the children get up from the floor each turn to demonstrate their actions with lots of general body movement and animation and they use the nearby furniture as props. When her son uses the couch to show balancing on one foot, Julie, who is mindful of the safety hazard responds "Excuse me…you're standing…get down. You're going to jump."

While Julie smiles throughout the game and laughs occasionally, her affect appears to be quite flat and her body seems rigid. Overall, she does not appear to be enjoying herself. It seems that she does not know what to do to make the game more fun or involved or to tap into or extend the children's knowledge. She makes numerous verbal attempts to keep her boisterous children calm, by making requests like "Okay settle down." Later, in a discussion about the play routine, Julie states that she never really had much of a childhood and really does not know how to play. Likewise, Andrea remains a detached observer when she is involved in a play routine with her daughter and friend. She puffs on a cigarette and instructs her daughter to "smarten up" when she feels her behaviour is getting too rowdy and she wants her to settle down.

A make-believe play sequence with Beth's family is quite repetitive. They role-play a routine with which the family seems quite familiar; a family member has an illness and visits the doctor. The children repeat the scenario several times alternating roles as doctor and patient, with both parents always portraying patients with various ailments. As the script unfolds, they wait for their turn in the waiting room of a doctor's office for a long period, have a short appointment with a nameless doctor, the doctor prescribes a medication and the patient takes the prescription, thanks the doctor and leaves. It is noteworthy that two of the young children could appropriately prescribe the antibiotic Ceclor for the conditions described by the patients. This is likely indicative of the frequency with which they had been treated with this drug, as Ceclor would not otherwise be expected to be in a healthy eight year old child's lexicon.