Play Therapy Training

Acknowledging the Voices of Child Clients

The purpose of the professional issue position paper was to investigate the provision of play therapy courses in marriage and family therapy (MFT) programs. Although marriage and family therapists encounter child clients, they are often inadequately trained to interact effectively with children or deliberately exclude them from family therapy (Johnson & Thomas, 1990; Cederborg, 1997; Cox, 1997; Raimondi & Walters, 2004; Lund, Zimmerman, & Haddock, 2002). Play therapy was proposed as a means of enabling therapists to better assist young children in the therapeutic process. Through a qualitative review of literature, the following areas were explored: (a) the historical development of play therapy; (b) the applicability of play therapy that meets the developmental needs and abilities of children; and (c) the utilization of play therapy strategies. This exploration also showed that professionals working with children often rely on play therapy. However, without appropriate training, their application of play therapy may not achieve the intended results.

Although children are often direct or indirect clients in marriage and family therapy (MFT), research studies have shown that many marriage and family therapists are either not well trained to work with children or deliberately exclude them from family thera

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eople and events at the same time. Moreover, they are able to transcend the limited perspectives of their lives to take a systemic view of how the larger societal systems affect their lives. As the foregoing description of the stages of cognitive-emotional development indicates, children aged between 3 and 11 often lack the reasoning capacity to understand or interpret their problems in a logical fashion. Hanney and Kozlowska,(2002) emphasized that preschool children who are confronted with stressful situations or memories experience a physiological response of hyperarousal, which undermines their ability to utilize their developing cognitive capacity. Physiological responses of overwhelming anxiety, fear, and distraction may make many children unable to participate in family-therapy sessions because they are unable to access these traumatic memories and to verbalize their feelings. Thus a first-grade student in the sensorimotor stage may not be able to properly express that he is sad about his parents' divorce. Instead, he may demonstrate his egocentric thinking by stating his wish for his parents to attend his baseball game so that they can see how much fun they can have as a family. Another child may not even be able to verbali
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 9727
Approximate Pages = 39 (250 words per page)

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