I’m not sure this is true. When I taught primary, I’d say most of the boys were playing football at playtime regardless of family income or class. Some of the girls too. The most stark difference that I saw was between the girls who weren’t playing sport. The girls from better off backgrounds were generally more likely to be engaged in imaginary games until an older age. Girls from lower income families often seemed more ‘grown up’ than the others and would, generally, be more likely to chat instead of playing. But these are generalisations. We always had a few girls (and occasionally boys) who had more responsibility at home than the others, usually the oldest siblings. These kids were more likely to be from lower income families, I suppose because families with higher incomes can afford to buy in services to help with the tasks that the parents can’t juggle. The more responsibility at home, the less likely they were to play and the younger they stopped playing.
Children with difficult home lives were generally less likely to play too. While a child from any background can experience home difficulties, we had kids who were living in B&Bs or very overcrowded or damp homes. These types of issues can make a child more tired, stressed and less likely to play in my experience.
It’s hard for me to comment on the impact that tech has because at primary, it’s less obvious who has more access to screens at home because they don’t bring phones into school. To be honest, parents from across the income spectrum talked to me about difficulties with managing screen time at home. But this was back when tablets etc were (relatively) new and not as sophisticated as they are now, so at the time it was mainly the highest income families where children had access to their own iPad, for example, instead of sharing one between a family or not having one at all. I expect that’s changed significantly now. I didn’t notice a particular difference in the play habits of the children who I knew had access to their own tech, but I suspect that on average, parents were probably more wary of allowing a lot of screen time when this type of handheld tech was relatively new than they are now.
But I also think it has something to do with the personality of the child. I hated being a kid and wanted to grow up as rapidly as possible, I can remember feeling patronised by any attempts by adults to get me to engage in play by the time I was about 6. My mother says that I flatly refused to engage in the ‘let’s all pretend to be monkeys getting onto Noah’s ark’-type activities at playgroup and school from when I was a tot. I have no doubt that more play would have been good for me, and I had plenty of opportunities to play, but nothing could have persuaded me to do it. I wanted to craft, join in with the jobs that adults were doing, and do structured board game-type play that didn’t seem ‘babyish’ to me. I was on an absolute mission to get to adulthood and be independent and autonomous, which seems sad looking back, but I don’t think there’s anything my parents could have done to change that.
My sister, on the other hand, played imaginary games with toys until at least the start of secondary with exactly the same home environment. I sometimes idly wonder (because, according to my mother, I was extremely play-averse to a very noticeable degree so we talk about it a bit in relation to my own child and how he’s different to me at the same age) whether it is extremely complex and things like birth order and even gap between siblings comes into it. I was the oldest with a four-year age gap, so I always saw my place in the family as the much older one. My sister, conversely, probably saw herself as very much the youngest. There was no competition between us because that would have been unfair given the age gap, so she had no impetus to try and act older and ‘catch up’ with me and perhaps that made her feel free to be childlike and playful for longer. I was always very happy in my role as the big sister and she was always happy to be the little one, until we were older and became more like peers. Looking back, I’d say my friends with the same birth order and age gap tended to follow the same dynamic, whereas friends with smaller gaps were more like peers from the get-go and more likely to do imaginary play at home together, with less defined ‘older and younger’ identities.
sorry for the ramble, what an interesting question!