Advanced Play Therapy

Essential Conditions, Knowledge, and Skills for Child Practice

Dee Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136869334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

Current play therapy resources offer details on how to conduct play therapy, but are limited in addressing the challenges that develop when therapists conduct play therapy with real-life clients. Using the Child-Centered Play Therapy Approach, Ray has written the first book to address these complex play therapy subjects. Topics covered include: integrating field knowledge of play, development, and theory into the advanced play therapist's knowledge base; working with difficult situations, such as limit-setting, aggression, and parents; addressing modern work concerns like measuring progress, data accountability, and treatment planning; differentiating play therapy practice in school and community settings; and addressing complicated skills, such as theme work, group play therapy, and supervision. Ray also includes her Child Centered Play Therapy Treatment Manual, an invaluable tool for any play therapist accountable for evidence-based practice. This manual can also be found on the accompanying downloadable resources, along with treatment plan, session summary, and progress-tracking worksheets.

CHAPTER 1

History, Rationale, and Purpose of Play

Play therapy is a modality designed to serve children based on their most effective form of communication—play. Among play therapists, there are several statements that are routinely used to discuss the value of play, such as “play is the child’s natural form of communication,” “play bridges concrete experience to abstract thought,” and “play is intrinsically motivated,” among others. In fact, these statements are used so often that it is difficult to trace their origins. Certainly, Jean Piaget (1962), Swiss biologist and philosopher, is the most frequently cited contributor to a rationale for play in therapy. His exploration and explanation of how a child progresses through development using play as a form of assimilating the environment are the foundations of understanding the child’s application of play in therapy. The history, research, and theories of play are rich with observation and discussion. The scholarly approach of Piaget and others is only one side of play inquiry. Play has been explored as an cultural phenomenon, instinctual drive, mode of education, economic influence, religious connotation, as well as its significant relationship with psychology and development—all of which have implications for the practice of play therapy.

History of Play

Play is depicted and discussed throughout the history of the world, mostly concentrated on its link to the experiences of childhood. Early views from the ancient Western world considered children as helpless, incapable, and having specials needs, such as the need to play (Hughes, 2010). Plato emphasized the use of play to build skills but also cautioned against too much adult supervision (Hughes, 2010; Smith, 2010). The rise of Christianity led to the belief that each child possessed a unique soul that was valued by God. The growing attitude of the individual value of each child, along with the belief that the child was innately sinful and unruly, led to a parental view of child’s play as needing adult guidance and supervision. The adult role was to channel the play of the child into activities that were beneficial and productive.

Christianity led to the rise of Protestantism in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A stricter approach to play was adopted in which play was seen as idle and mixed with instinctually negative motivations. John Locke of England (1632–1704) promoted the widely accepted philosophy that the child was born as a blank slate (tabula rasa) and the environment needs to be completely controlled by the parent to move children in the right direction. Chudacoff (2007), who traced the history of play in America, writes of Locke’s influence on the early Puritan way of life:

Locke was no modernist; his aim was to inculcate self-control, denial, and order in children’s behavior, and the play that he most favored was the kind that a child could undertake under a teacher’s careful supervision. Unstructured play, to him, was not appropriate (p. 27).

As a result, play was virtually suppressed by the middle and end of the eighteenth century (Hughes, 2010).

As Protestantism heavily influenced the view of children in England and America, a philosopher from France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published a novel, Emile, or On Education (1762), suggesting a positive nature of children. Rousseau believed that the natural state of children was movement toward taking in human virtue and goodness. Children needed to be appreciated, cared for, and allowed to operate naturally with little adult supervision. An outcome of this view of children was that play was accepted as an appreciated part of being young, embraced by adults as a celebration of childhood. Rousseau’s philosophy ushered in a new, romantic perception of children that was quickly embraced by others throughout Europe, and eventually America. Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) in Germany founded the kindergarten system based on his advocacy of play as a means of learning while Maria Montessori (1870–1952) in Italy integrated play into education as a means of learning about real life (Smith, 2010).

In America, the view of play was met with ambivalence. The early settlers were conflicted about a basic belief in submission to God, juxtaposed against a strong, growing sense of independence demanding freedom from human authority. Practically speaking, early America was an agricultural society that demanded a workforce consisting of all able bodies. Hence, children were viewed as independent, worthy of appreciation but vessels to be guided by adults to become productive members of a community, lest they give in to an innate sinful nature. The adult response to play was the concrete manifestation of this ambivalence. Play was allowed but only under conditions that it was not an idle waste of time and led to the child’s development of religious and work ethics. Often, during this time, there was no delineation between adult and child play. Children and adults often played games together and played with the same toys, materials used by anyone for amusement. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that toys began to be produced or viewed as materials belonging specifically to children (Chudacoff, 2007).

The beginning of the nineteenth century marked an emerging acceptance of childhood as a separate entity of development. In this acceptance, children were romanticized as innocent and playful, encouraging parents to delay the onset of adult responsibilities. This romanticism should also be viewed in the context of a growing industrialization in America where preadolescents labored in factories and workshops. The boundaries of childhood were limited to very young ages. Yet, by 1850, society recognized the playful rather than corrupt nature of children and not only tolerated but began to appreciate children’s play (Chudacoff, 2007). The second half of the nineteenth century saw a rise in professional interest in play. Child study experts published manuals for parenting and child development, mostly concerned with the intellectual and moral growth of children, and mostly advocating a supervised approach to play. Philosophers continued to debate the purpose and use of play. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), an English philosopher working within an evolutionary approach, described play as derived from excess energy developed in evolutionary higher species stimulated by highly developed nervous systems, referred to as surplus energy theory (Smith, 2010). Karl Groos (1861–1946), a German psychologist and author, argued that play was of functional significance and provided practice for skills needed for survival (Hughes, 2010; Smith, 2010). One of the first American psychologists interested in child development, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), countered what he saw as Groos’ simplistic view of play. Hall observed that play was cathartic in nature and tied to the evolutionary progression of humans through playing out natural instincts from human history, referred to as recapitulation theory (Hughes, 2010; Smith, 2010). In America, this new and focused concentration on play translated behaviorally into the establishment of playgrounds, manufacturing of toys, and an adult focus on the initiation and supervision of children’s play. Despite these adult efforts to encourage play, Chudacoff (2007) cited the psychology study of T.R. Crosswell in 1896 in which he surveyed 2,000 school children and concluded that free, unstructured play apart from work, school, or adult supervision was the most beneficial use of children’s leisure time.

The advent of the twentieth century welcomed an explosion of interest in child development and child play. Psychologists turned their attention to the details involved in the psychological, intellectual, and educational nature of development. The use of play has always been closely aligned to an explanation of development, and authors of the twentieth century seemed attuned to this relationship. Sigmund Freud saw children as progressing through sexual stages of life, each one demanding a successful resolution. Children could use play to reduce anxiety, managing instinctual negative drives, through the stages of development. John Dewey advocated a progressive view of education that accepted the natural state of the child and promoted an appreciation of the child’s own instincts, activities, and interests as the guide for education. The twentieth century was the child-centered era of adopting the structure of childhood as a separate and unique phase of human development. This child-centered era (not to be confused with child-centered play therapy or person-centered theory) was signified by an appreciation of childhood as a structure, a desire to study the uniqueness of the child’s experience, and a need to generalize children’s experiences into a coherent explanation of development. It is within this context, continued confusion over the role and purpose of play, that all theories and practices of play therapy developed.

The child-centered era in the twentieth century also generated what Smith (2010) refers to as the “play ethos” (p. 27). Smith noted that from the 1920s forward, educational thinking seemed to be impacted by an overarching view of the importance of play. He defined the play ethos as “a strong and unqualified assertion of the functional importance of play, namely that it is essential to adequate (human) development…” (p. 28). He further questioned the acceptance of the play ethos due to assumption of correctness and lack of empirical support.

There are two noticeable controversies emerging from a historical study of play. The first is most obvious and described throughout the literature, the conflict regarding the nature of the child. If a child is viewed as innately positive, born of the inherent good nature of humankind, then play is instinctively destined to move the child toward growth and should be trusted as a self-initiated element of childhood. However, if the child is born a blank slate or with an inclination toward a depraved nature, play will be an exercise in the child’s lack of knowledge of what is good or practice in evil, thereby needing adult attention, supervision, and guidance. The second controversy regarding play appears to be a central theme in Chudacoff’s (2007) historical review. Despite adult perspectives, actions, focus, guidance, initiation, and supervision of play, children will exert a need for autonomy away from the adult world to fully express their play. Chudacoff (2007) concluded from the period of 1850 to 1900, “… the breach of adult constraints signifies a vital dimension of children’s play” (p.93). Later, he observed, “Dodging the control of parents has long been a part of growing up, but in the first half of the twentieth century resistance and the quest for autonomy flourished in ways that previously had not existed…about the mid-1950s, the nature of unstructured play, the places in which it occurred, and the peer-oriented culture of childhood promoted a type of behavior that, in varying degrees, signified children’s freedom of action” (p. 151). In his observation of 1950 to present, he suggested, “The ways that children have used, and continue to use, toys rather than how grownups want toys to be used remains the most vital quality of children’s autonomous play…children’s manipulation of objects for their own purposes creates true play value” (pp. 197–198). In his final conclusions regarding the history of play in America, Chudacoff wrote, “Nevertheless, kids still want to be kids in their own way, and although they are generally willing to follow adult prescriptions, they also inhabit an independent, underground culture of self-devised play. And thus the two main continuities in children’s play are the quest for autonomy and the demonstration of creativity” (p. 219).

Properties and Type of Play

Properties of Play

The definition of play is illusive, due to its various identified types and definitions. There is not just one definition, but theorists contend that there are many elements that help distinguish play from other activities. Garvey (1977) described five properties of play, including play must be pleasurable/enjoyable, have no extrinsic goals, be spontaneous and voluntary, involve active engagement by the participant, and contain an element of makebelieve. Although this description of play is cited often in the literature, it has limited use in understanding play therapy. Brown (2009) concurred with Garvey but offered more specificity in his list of elements. He noted that play is apparently purposeless, voluntary, inherently attractive (fun), provides freedom from time, diminished consciousness of self, improvisational potential, and a continuation desire. These representations of play construct a view of play as a fun activity with little purpose as acknowledged by the player.

Experienced play therapists would question whether the play observed in play therapy is always pleasurable to the child or whether it appears to be spontaneous and voluntary. Many children appear angry, sad, and confused when they play out certain scenes and sometimes appear as though they are being forced to carry through on play scenes that are painful for them, yet they keep playing, possibly looking for some end outside of their awareness. These kinds of actions in play therapy lead to further questions regarding the classification of certain behaviors in play therapy as play, or the proposal of a different definition of play. Concretely, when a child in the playroom screams angrily over and over at a doll because the doll knocked over a toy lamp, is this child playing or should this activity be labeled differently? Vygotsky (1966) claimed that the definition of play based on the pleasure it gives the child is incorrect for two reasons: (a) there are a number of activities that give a child more pleasurable experiences than play (such as sucking in an infant), and (b) there are games and play activities in which the child does not derive pleasure (such as losing at a baseball game). In consideration of previously identified elements and Vygotsky’s contribution, perhaps the elements that best describe play in play therapy would be activity in which the child is free from adult direction, actively engaged, experiencing a flow with little self-consciousness, and released from literal grounding to reality.

Types of Play

Again, just as there is no consensus on the definition and properties of play, there are a multitude of identified types of play. David Elkind (2007), a leading child psychologist, identified four types of play, including mastery play, innovative play, kinship play, and therapeutic play. Mastery play is denoted by exploration and repetition. The child is goal oriented and working toward competence of a given skill. Only after a child has mastered skills is there the opportunity to expand and elaborate on them. Piaget claimed that play could only occur after a skill had been mastered (Kohlberg & Fein, 1987). The mastery of language and motor skills leads to innovative play, which is an expansion of both nonverbal and verbal types of play. Kinship play occurs with the interaction of more than one child, usually through self-initiated games. Therapeutic play helps a child deal with stress, impulsivity, or trauma, among others, by offering an outlet for the child to express troublesome reactions to events. Elkind cited that all children use play therapeutically as a way of dealing with stress.

Smith (2010) attempted to summarize six types of play that are commonly recognized in the literature: social contingency, sensorimotor, object, language, physical activity, and fantasy. Social contingency play is play that is based on the participant’s interaction with another person. Sensorimotor play is primarily confined to infancy and involves activities with objects based on the sensory properties of the object. Children usually initiate object play following the sensorimotor period by engaging in activities with objects. Language play consists of playing with words and verbalization of concepts. Physical activity play includes play that involves gross motor skills. Fantasy or pretend play is play that uses objects, actions, or verbalizations and is released from the boundaries of realism, allowing for symbolic expression. The modality of play therapy allows for each and every type of play identified by both Elkind and Smith, especially play therapy that allows for child self-direction.

Play Development

Developmental theories on play typically measure play behaviors up to 4 years of age, due to children’s mastery of play structure to process and communicate by this age. Although the majority of play therapy clients will exceed 4 years old, comprehension of developmental sequence of play allows the play therapist to track the child client’s history and mastery of play as a develo...