Play Therapy
Getting Your Money’s Worth at the Therapist’s Office
Therapy is expensive and many parents have concerns about paying for a child to play. Still, decades of research have demonstrated many benefits to skilled Play Therapy.
Parents may take their child to a therapist for many reasons, often to gain help in understanding or changing their child’s behavior. Parents are often concerned to learn that therapy with their child is going to involve toys and crayons. Those are items readily found at home and therapy is expensive. Why should a parent pay someone else to play with their kid? That is a good question, and when that person is a therapist, the answers are many.
What is Play Therapy?
The value of Play Therapy, a combination of play and therapeutic counseling, has been researched and validated for decades. It is an internationally and scientifically recognized treatment modality used by therapists of various theoretical orientations. It may include the use of various art techniques, clay, sand and sand tray techniques, story telling, puppetry, dolls or iconic figures, and creative visualization to name a few.
Advantages of Play Therapy:
The most important aspect of play therapy is this: Whenever possible, therapy, ethically, must be done in a client’s first language; Play is a child’s first language. Further, children can experience sophisticated feelings similar to an adult but they generally lack the language to express them, or the developmental understanding to process them on their own. Play allows a child to express deep, complicated, or even repressed feelings in a safe, non-threatening way. Additionally, Play Therapists can use play to teach skills without the child feeling lectured, nagged, or blamed. This dynamic alone makes a child more willing to learn the skill or lesson he needs.
Interestingly, because of the previously described benefits of Play Therapy, its application is not limited to children. Play Therapy works well for any one of any age who has difficulty expressing him or her self, and as such is sometimes used on adults as well as children and adolescents.
Uses of Play Therapy:
Some of the uses of Play Therapy include:
- Assessment and identification of causes for an individual’s symptoms
- Teaching families effective skills for cohesiveness
- Teaching parents how to instruct children in a non-critical or threatening manner
- Special Skills Training: including impulse control, anger management, social skills, etc.
- To treat a variety of conditions including: Pervasive Developmental Disorders (such as Asperger’s), Mood Disorders, ADD/ADHD, Trauma, Grief, Anxiety and Separation Anxiety Disorders, Enuresis and Encopresis, and many others
- To build an individual’s overall sense of self worth and competency
- To allow expression of feeling and emotional ventilation: (this works especially well for cases of loss including death and divorce)
What to Look for in a Play Therapist:
As mentioned earlier, anyone can play with your child. In many instances however, only a skilled clinician can use play effectively in therapy. A skilled Play Therapist will not just use play to entertain the individual for 50 minutes; she will be able to tell you at any point in therapy what she is working on with your child. Further, for pre-adolescent children (tweens) and older, the child will be able to tell you himself what he worked on for the day (e.g. social skills, feelings, etc.). In interviewing a prospective therapist, ask her what her position on play therapy is and how she uses it in session. Finally, never feel shy about researching a therapist’s credentials.
More Information:
More information on Play Therapy can be found through professional associations such as The Association for Play Therapy.
