Children can benefit enormously from psychotherapy. There are often situations that become challenging for them, a therapist can help them gain the tools needed to overcome those situations. An effective approach with children is Play Therapy.
As explained by Virginia Axline (1969), an expert in the field: “Play Therapy is based upon the fact that play is the child’s natural medium of self-expression. It is an opportunity for the child to ‘play out’ his/her feelings and problems just as adults talk out their difficulties.”
Once we reach adulthood, we’ve learned to communicate our thoughts and feelings verbally, we’ve also become familiar with identifying our feelings and their possible causes, children are not there yet. Most young children don’t have the vocabulary or even the emotional awareness to understand and communicate what goes on in their inside world.
A child would most likely “act out” the feelings that are unsettling her/him instead of verbalizing them. Adults are often confused and unable to understand and respond to what the child is trying to communicate through behavior, situation that can end up in frustration for both parties.
When adults demand from a child a solely verbal communication about emotions he/she is wrongly assuming that both child and adult have the same level of expression and ability to communicate verbally.
Play therapy provides the means and environment to allow the therapist to enter the child’s world and get a better understanding of what is happening instead of asking the child to come into the adult world to communicate.
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