China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Child-Centered Play Therapy With Children Who Are Dying
Published in Lawrence C. Rubin, Handbook of Medical Play Therapy and Child Life, 2017
Child-centered play therapy (CCPT) is recognized in the medical community as an intervention that meets a child’s developmental needs while facilitating the child’s natural progression toward self-acceptance and enhancement. Children naturally communicate through play, therefore “play therapy is a developmentally and culturally responsive intervention particularly suited to treat young children’s social, emotional, and behavioral problems” (Bratton, 2013, p. 30). Specifically, CCPT identifies the safe and trusting relationship between child and therapist as vital to the healing process. CCPT is a therapeutic approach that relies on the interpersonal relationship between a child and trained play therapist that utilizes the child’s natural medium of communication—play—to facilitate the development of a safe environment for the child to fully express and explore his or her feelings, thoughts, experiences, and behaviors (Landreth, 2012). In this chapter, we present CCPT as a responsive approach for terminally ill and dying children. In the medical setting, where children are likely to lose a sense of autonomy and control over their actions and bodies, CCPT offers a child the experience to feel fully capable to direct his or her process of grief, loss, and pain. Children who encounter imminent death have little control over their biological processes, but they maintain the ability to direct how to cope with their losses in self-enhancing ways.
Counseling Parents and Children with HIV
Published in David M. Aronstein, Bruce J. Thompson, HIV and Social Work, 2014
For the child, play therapy can provide a safe haven for children to work through feelings of isolation, separation, and abandonment or to learn to cope with medical procedures. Displacement activities, such as storytelling and art are other important interventions that often help school-age children begin to address their worries. For example, having the child write a story or draw a picture about what it is like for an imaginary child to live with AIDS allows them to begin to explore their own feelings within a safe modality. This most often leads to direct communication of the child’s thoughts, feelings, fears, and anxieties. Adolescents also benefit tremendously from counseling. Issues related to peer relationships, secrecy, stigma, and sexual practices, and fears associated with rejection are frequently discussed in both individual counseling and support groups for HIV-infected teens.
Acceptability and Effectiveness of Humor- and Play-Infused Exposure Therapy for Fears in Williams Syndrome
Published in Evidence-Based Practice in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2022
Bonita P. Klein-Tasman, Brianna N. Young, Karen Levine, Kenia Rivera, Elizabeth J. Miecielica, Brianna D. Yund, Sydni E. French
There is also a paucity of research with young children, even though, as Kershaw et al. (2017) review, fears and phobias are at least as prevalent among young children as they are among older children (Egger & Angold, 2006) and are predictive of later psychosocial challenges (Bittner et al., 2007; Cole et al., 1998; Gregory et al., 2007; Kendall et al., 2004). A single randomized clinical trial with 4- to 7-year-old typically developing children showed the effectiveness of CBT for anxiety in young children; in this sample of children with a variety of anxiety concerns, 69% of the children treated for specific phobias showed improvement with intervention (Hirshfeld-Becker et al., 2010). Very recently, and in the midst of the conduct of the current study, case-study-based publications emerged demonstrating the effectiveness of a modified intensive one-session intervention for fears and phobias in typically developing 4-year-olds (Farrell et al., 2018; Kershaw et al., 2017). In this approach, there were 3 hours of intervention on a single day, and exposure and response prevention sessions were preceded by a play therapy session to establish the therapist-child working relationship. Significant reduction in fear was indeed observed for the five participants across these two studies, demonstrating that a brief intervention could indeed be useful for young typically developing children.
Reflections on Hilde Bruch’s “The Role of the Parent in Psychotherapy with Children”
Published in Psychiatry, 2021
In working with parents, child therapists and analysts can benefit from integrating family systems perspectives into their work. In a humorous but insightful article, family therapists Montalvo and Haley (1973) discuss child therapy from a systems point of view. They deftly analyze the impact of the child therapist on the family system, though the child therapist may neither intend, nor be aware of, this impact. For example, they describe play therapy as providing an indirect, unstated conduit for two-way communication between therapist and parents. The child therapist “used the child to bring about change in the family. In this sense, child therapy was similar to the approach taken by some family therapists who select a key member of the family and interview him individually, using him as a lever to bring about family change. However, child therapy developed a unique method of influencing a family with its use of ’play’ with the child. It is significant that the vehicle used to enter the complicated organization of family life was the child, the most innocent and directly perceptive member” (p. 139). As child therapists we can benefit by acknowledging and using the fact that we are always interacting with the family system, even as we focus on the child’s inner life and individuality.
“Providing a perspective that’s a little bit different”: Academic and professional experiences of male speech-language pathologists
Published in International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2021
Jamie H. Azios, Monica Bellon-Harn
Many participants expressed uncertainty of their role in some contexts due to maleness. While they felt confident to perform work-related activities across a wide scope of practice, situations that called for stereotypically-female behaviours were uncomfortable. Two participants discussed play therapy with young children as problematic. Matthew linked this difficulty to life experience explaining, “I wasn’t brought up doing that.” Jason related his uncertainty to others’ expectations: “They don’t expect to see a man sitting on the floor playing with a kid and talking in a high register.” Interestingly, Sean felt confident working in areas that might be labelled as more feminine. For example, he spoke about working in an outpatient setting with infants who were having difficulty breastfeeding. While he initially had some concerns about mothers’ responses to a male SLP, these were quickly resolved and he felt “comfortable” stating, “Oh God like I can slang a baby around uh I mean that’s really what I have done. And I have seen a lot of 1 to 3-week-old babies…This is as comfortable as it gets.”