Mildred Bernice Parten Newhall (August 4, 1902 – May 26, 1970) was an American sociologist, a researcher at

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

's Institute of Child Development. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. In it she developed the theory of six stages of child's play, which led to a series of influential publications. Newhall was one of the first to conduct extensive studies on children for the case of play. She supervised children between two and five years old for intense one-minute periods. In these time frames, she could see the different children's behavior and documented them accordingly. She noted that most of the play is by themselves, in the first four stages. The latter two are more extensive sets of play, and occur in older age groups which involve more interaction between children. She was married to Sidney Newhall, a researcher for

Eastman Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...

. Mildred Parten Newhall was a research associate in psychology at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of Roc ...

and died in 1970.

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* 1902 births 1970 deaths American sociologists American women sociologists University of Minnesota alumni University of Rochester faculty {{US-sociologist-stub