Play is the language of children — which is why play therapy can help kids speak the unspeakable.
Dee Ray doesn’t learn how children feel by listening to their words. Ray, a researcher and counselor in Texas, learns by watching them play.
She directs the Center for Play Therapy at the University of North Texas and often works in schools, where she sections off a 10 feet by 10 feet area in a classroom and fills the space with toys — a child sized kitchenette, puppets, a bop bag that a child who needs to work out some aggression can punch.
With one client, the toy that led to healing was a snake. The interaction involved a 5-year-old Black girl who attended a school where 90 percent of her classmates were Latinx and white, Ray said, obscuring some details to protect the child’s privacy. During their second session together, the girl chose a toy snake to play with, then covered it in sand in an effort to make it white. If the snake were black, people wouldn’t like it, she told Ray.
The child’s game prompted some simple, empathic reflections from Ray: “It seems like they don’t understand her. They don’t know that she wants to be their friend.” But the child’s imagination led their time together. The snake got sick, and she nursed it back to health. She made sure it had a safe place to sleep and helped it make friends with other animal figurines.
To Ray, this was progress. In the first session, the child had simply shown interest in the toy. Now, she’d gone deeper, using the sand and playing out different scenarios. By caring for the toy, the child showed confidence that she could accept and nurture herself, even in the face of adversity. The therapist had affirmed how she felt about being excluded because of her race. It was painful and confusing for the girl, but it was also a normal reaction.
[To read the rest of this article by Dani McClain, click here.]
[Photo: Kristine Potter for the New York Times.]
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