Arthur Kraft - Parents as Therapeutic Partners: Are You Listening to Your Childs Play?

PARENTS AS THERAPEUTIC
PARTNERS

LISTENING TO YOUR CHILDS PLAY

Arthur Kraft and Garry Landreth

Copyright 1998 by Jason Aronson Inc.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Jason Aronson Inc. except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kraft, Arthur.

Parents as therapeutic partners : listening to your childs play /
Arthur Kraft, Garry Landreth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7657-0106-5 (alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-7657-0106-0
1. Play therapy. 2. Parent and child. I. Landreth, Garry.
II. Title
RJ505.P6K72 1997
649'. 1DC21

97-20340

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Jason Aronson offers books and cassettes. For information and catalog write to Jason Aronson Inc., 230 Livingston Street, Northvale, New Jersey 07647-1731. Or visit our website: http://www.aronson.com

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A child who was constantly hitting and teasing other children, stuck to his mother like glue, and talked nonstop

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A child who stuttered and always looked unhappy

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An overly helpless child who was thought to be retarded

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A poorly coordinated child who had a short attention span and was extremely dependent

This book is for parents and for professionals who work with parents and families.

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, is one way of stating that the patterns of behavior acquired by young children tend to accompany them throughout life. Many a school record is filled with support for this belief. A student is unruly in first grade, suspended for repeated insolence in sixth grade, and removed from a class or from school altogether in eleventh grade for threatening a teacher. Or a student is attentive and hard-working in first grade and an honor student in twelfth grade. Many parents can recall traits that a child developed in the first few years of life that are still very much a part of that person forty years later.

If patterns are set in the first few years of life, it follows that whatever is going on in the parentchild interaction to develop these patterns is of tremendous importance.

And yet, surprisingly, parents are given little real help in childrearing. Yes, there are Spock, Gesell, and such. But they dont help parents cope with questions such as: What do I do if my child is becoming too aggressive or not aggressive enough? Too demanding or too dependent? Negativistic or conforming? Overly jealous of a sibling? Behaving in a bizarre manner? Delighting in driving me crazy? Extremely fearful of just about everything? (And what really hurts is that the child showing these tendencies may be only four or five years old, and it is hard to fool ourselves into blaming the childs difficulties on school when the child hasnt yet entered school!)

Actually, there has been a source of help available for several decades, but it has only been used in special circumstances: psychotherapy. Some parents seriously concerned about their children have taken them to a child psychologist or counselor. The psychologist or counselor has generally conducted what are known as play therapy sessionsusing play rather than words alone because of the childs age. Young children feel relatively comfortable with puppets and clay and drawing materials; it is their way of life. And what they are concerned about emerges soon enough for the astute observer.

Assuming these techniques are beneficial, why must they be limited to those children who are very much in need and whose parents happen to believe in psychotherapy, are able to afford psychotherapy, and are living in a city where psychotherapy is available? Isnt there some way to expand the use of psychotherapy with children to bring the benefits to any child?

Parents as Therapeutic Partners is about bringing these benefits to more children. It is about expanding the use of play sessions a hundredfold. How? By having parents be the ones to conduct play sessions with their own young children.

Is that possible? Can every parent be transformed into a child psychologist? No. But every parent can learn to conduct play sessions with his or her own child, sessions modeled on the techniques used by the child psychologist.

True, if a psychologist conducts the play session, the psychologist is apt to do so more skillfully than a parent. But then the session is over and the psychologist is gone, not to be seen until the next session, probably next week. The parent feels left out at best and at worst guilty for being the apparent cause of the childs problems. In contrast, when the parent conducts the play session, the parent becomes the instrument through which the child is helped. The parents own morale gets a boost. And the parent is there in the house with the child all week long. When new behaviors hatched in the play sessions spill over into the rest of the week, as they invariably do, the parent will be there to receive them with understanding and guide them along constructively.

There is another aspect of these play sessions that is even more important: the parent changes too. The professional psychologist is not apt to change during the course of therapy and it wouldnt do the child any good if he did. But for the parent to change is of utmost importance.

Another consideration: if someone falls on his face on the sidewalk and you help that person upsurely the humane thing to doyou may have conveyed to him that he had to be helped up, that without help he could not have gotten up himself. While you have helped him up physically, you may just have helped him down psychologically! But suppose you both fall. And you both get up togetherhelping each other to do so. Thats helpphysical and psychological. That is growing together.

In practice what happens is that the parent seeks help because the parent is having some kind of trouble with a child. The child is overly aggressive, overly timid, overly negativistic, overly fearful, overly something. The parent wants the child straightened out. Somewhere in the back of the parents mind is the sure knowledge that the child isnt behaving this way in a vacuum but in relation to the parent, in relation to the way the child is being raised. Yet such thoughts provoke parental feelings of guilt and hopelessness and so the parent returns to the old straightening out point of view. But this notion in the back of parent heads is the real meat of the issue. Its the way the child behaves in relation to the parent that is where the money is. It always takes two to tangle.

When a parent conducts play sessions, the parent begins to behave in an entirely new way, first by following instructions for a half-hour a week; later, more subtly, by becoming more understanding, more empathic while less emotionally entangled with the child. Thus both the parent and the child grow and develop.

Now what exactly is a play session? It is a period of thirty minutes per week in which the parent will be very nondirective, inviting the child to open upsuch a small amount of time and yet so effective.

For thirty minutes a week a parent is going to be alone with a child. Alone, no interruptions. (That in itself is not as simple as it sounds.) The parent is going to follow the childs leads, do what the child wants, short of inflicting any real damage. The parent is going to be accepting, understanding. (That is about ten times as hard as it sounds.) The parent is going to learn to read meaning into what takes place and become a far more astute observer than before.