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Play Therapy For Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

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Play Therapy Critique

SWG 617
Stephanie Loyer
Arizona State University

Play therapy is a type of psychotherapy that uses play to aid in the therapeutic process. It is most commonly used with children between the ages of four to eleven since they are too young to communicate well through language and this is the period when children most likely use imaginary play although it can be adapted to suit any age. Play therapy allows children to problem solve, learn and express their emotions. It also gives children the chance to explore their environment in a safe and non-threatening way. Play therapy assists children to focus on the activities and not on the stress of the outcome. Dolls, sandboxes, drawings and games are …show more content…

Play therapy works by offering the child new understanding of his behavior, problems and through this awareness helps the child to refocus his development (O’Connell, 2001).
Play has been recognized as an important tool for hundreds of years. Plato described the importance of play, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” The first documented case of play being used as a therapeutic approach was in 1909 when Freud worked with a little boy named Hans. One of the approaches Freud used for an intervention was play therapy. Freud described Little Hans as having anxiety and used dolls, art and role playing as an intervention to aid little Hans in developing awareness and coping skills (O’Neill, J. 2010). In 1919, Melanie Klein, an Austrian-British psychoanalyst, implemented the use of toys and play in her work with children. Klein also is associated with being one of the co-founders of object relations theory (Gil, E. 1991). Like her father, Anna Freud also used play therapy and was one of the first professionals to advocate a different type of therapy for children that was different from the traditional methods used for adult therapy. Anna believed that she could gain access into a child’s life and that play was the vehicle to allow that relationship to grow.

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