Play therapy is about allowing, encouraging and supporting free expression.
Its very challenging for parents to simply allow children to express themselves; a lot of parental responsibility is teaching and guiding. Play therapy is allowing expressions of inner feelings. When similar activities are done by parents and children, it can lead to deeper levels of trust in communicating feelings, issues, troubles. This becomes especially important for tweens and teens. We expect significant lessening of communication in teen years; it makes a huge difference when teens trust parents enough to convey difficult feelings and situations.
Parents have tremendous responsibility to teach and guide children to make better choices. It’s extremely difficult to take a break from teaching and guiding. It’s much easier to do play therapy when the child isn’t your own. However, one of the main issues preventing better communication between parents and children when children get older is parenting patterns – teaching and guiding. Teens become especially resistant to parents “telling me what to do”. If parents learn early to restrain themselves, and let children speak through their play, perhaps they can become better listeners when their children get older.
I’ve tried many times to explain this dynamic to teens and young adults who are frustrated and hurt by parental lack of patience, lack of tolerance, lack of understanding of their feelings, thoughts, issues. By that time, though, it’s often too late for people to make changes in communication styles. Plus, understandably parents are tired. They are ready for their children to become adults, already. The adult children are too young to understand this, and feel deeply hurt by their parents unavailability. It’s very sad to see, when parents have done their best for so many years.
The drive to raise children responsibly is very, very powerful. The urge to fix the situation, to help the child feel better, be safe, be smart, be healthy is very hard to resist. However, there are many aspects to the child’s need to find their own way, to explore their own feelings, their own choices – to learn how to navigate for themselves, speak for themselves. Parents are very aware of these needs; however, our society has only recently begun to support parents in their efforts to just be there. We are accustomed to all or nothing approaches; most of us have known family members who have been very quiet but nevertheless make their preferences very well known. The gruff uncle, for example, is not unusual and is often a big help. There are many, many ways of communicating and helping children and young people, and none need be abandoned.
One example I can give of a play therapy approach is one of a toddler and mother who were involved in a car accident. It wasn’t a bad accident, neither was injured, but the toddler became highly upset about getting into the car seat. Since that was a safety and legal requirement, there wasn’t any choice for the mother, but it upset her too. When I first saw them, the child was not saying much; she had regressed in her language development, which often happens after an upsetting or traumatic event.
The child did choose cars to play with, and did crash two cars together, repeatedly. This shocked the mother. I asked the mother to be quiet and showed interest in what the child was doing. She continued to be silent, and to crash the cars. We did this for a couple of sessions without noticable improvement. Then I asked the mother to bring the car seat into the sessions. The child then was reluctant to get into the car seat initially, and continued to crash the cars into each other. Her mother and I said nothing about the car seat. Then she began to approach the car seat, and then begun to get in and out of the car seat. We let her set the pace, and she, on her own, got in and out of the car seat, and in between crashed the cars against each other. She did these actions over and over, and I encouraged the mother to maintain a close and interested presence. I don’t recall how many sessions we had then to continue these behaviors, but I do recall that there weren’t a lot of sessions like this. The mother reported to me that the child had become comfortable with getting into and out of the car seat, and was calm and happy most of the time; she was how she had been prior to the accident. She recovered the level of language she had had previously.
So in summary, we allowed and observed the child to find the way she needed to become more comfortable with getting in and out of the car seat. We maintained close and supportive presences. We didn’t try to stop her or explain anything to her; she figured it out herself. She “worked through” the feelings she had about experiencing the accident and the loss of control that comes with any incident like a car accident. She found a way to acclimate herself, to process, this experience.
Her mother’s presence was important too. Yes, children do and do need to, experience and learn a lot on their own. As we all know, parental involvement and presence, are vital. It’s important to tell children they will be ok. It’s also important to help children learn about their own abilities, and to be present and less verbal about it. Encouraging children to become confident in themselves, their abilities to think, feel, figure things out – without always trying to teach them verbally – is also vital. We could think of this as being like an umbilical cord.
This is very hard for many, if not most parents to learn and accept. So much of the early years are so full of teaching! How many millions of times do parents have to say things like “Don’t run into the street”, “Don’t touch the stove”, “Brush your teeth”, etc., etc!! These types of statements become so automatic, it’s very hard to alter these habits. The levels of frustration that parenting uniformly brings makes it even harder.
The need for parental self care is another topic!