As a Child Centered Play Therapist you are interested in what a child is doing and why.
The short version? Themes and play theme shifts help you understand when a child is making progress and at the same time also helps you be significantly more effective during your time in session with a child. Want to know the long version? Check out the three reasons why knowing play themes is essential HERE!
One of the biggest factors that therapists need to consider when evaluating and assessing play is holding both the child’s chronological age and emotional age together.
But first, let’s break this down a bit. Chronological age is the actual age of the child - exactly how long they have been on this earth! Emotional age is the age in which a child is emotionally feeling and behaving. And chronological age and emotional age - welllll they don’t exactly always match up. Let’s dive into why. If a young person has experienced trauma - anywhere from a significant one time traumatic event to chronic and prolonged trauma they can get emotionally “stuck” at the age in which the trauma occurred. For example you may have a 12 year old in your office who emotionally presents more as 6 or 7 if they had experienced trauma at this age. Now does this mean this child needs to “grow up” and “act their age”? Absolutely not. This is just information and data for therapists to understand the complexity of the presenting issue. Now overall, yes - we do want children to be able to heal from their trauma and progress where their emotional age is the same as their chronological age. And at the same time that is not a necessary condition to participate in therapy. Check out this amazing resource HERE for typical early play stages for children. Resources like these help us understand if a child is playing within what we might expect for their chronological age OR if there is some emotional age regression in play. Knowing the difference between chronological and emotional age is also essential to not only understand if play themes could be related to trauma, but also help us make sense of a child who may appear at age level emotionally but then significantly regresses in emotional age once the playroom door shuts! If you don’t use emotional age as a lens for play theme interpretation these behaviors can be quite confusing! A great example of this would be a 10 year old client who regresses to solitary or onlooker play during session and although talks quite a bit during check in and on the walk back to the lobby doesn’t say a word the entire play therapy session and plays with their back to you. We might draw a lot of conclusions from this play and it might be easy to think the client is disengaged or resistant BUT when we take emotional age into account it is easier to see the value and trauma healing this play can provide! Overall we are also looking for kids to “grow up” in play and increase their emotional age until it matches the chronological age! Looking for more resources and support around play therapy themes? Check out the training Dinosaurs In The Dollhouse: Interpreting Themes in Play Therapy and learn the 7 frameworks and tools to interpret play themes with TONS of case examples! Loading...
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Hi, there!I'm Ann Meehan, an LPCC, Loading... Archives
October 2024
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