Parents’ perceptions of how their children learn most effectively are crucial drivers in shaping both how they interact with their children and the broader educational landscape in which their children are raised. Recent shifts in educational policy reflect an increasing acceptance of playful learning principles, but methodological gaps have made it challenging to determine which principles drive parents’ attitudes, and how widely shared these perceptions may be across the globe. In the present set of studies, we surveyed parents in the United States and China – countries with purportedly very different cultural attitudes toward education – to assess parent’s perceptions of the connection between common childhood activities and playful learning. Study 1, in the United States, and Study 3, in China, used a between-subjects design to examine parents’ perceptions of 37 common childhood activities across play and learning conditions. Study 2, in the United States, and 4, in China, used a within-subjects design to dig deeper into parents’ perceptions of the overlap between play and learning in these same activities and how this overlap was associated with the characteristics of playful learning (Zosh et al., 2018). We found similarities between both cultures in their categorization of childhood activities as playful and learning. Furthermore, parents in both the United States and China positively associated most characteristics of playful learning with activities that they categorized as both play and learning and that joyful was associated with play, either alone or in conjunction with learning, while joyful was not associated with learning alone.