The Celebration of Play

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

The United Nations Charter on human rights lists the play of children to be an inalienable right. To take a child's play away is to destroy that child's right to grow and to learn to live with other people. Play helps children gain social experience and to learn to communicate with others. Children use puppets and dolls in their play to rehearse what they want to say to parents, siblings, and peers. Playing helps the child work out conflict with the parents, for example, by pretending that her baby doll has an argument with mother and father and that the baby doll wins the argument. This empowers the child to feel her own self-expression and channels feelings and thoughts that are not accepted in her relationship with her parents.

In my child psychotherapy practice, Mary, age four, would come into my playroom and put the mother doll's head in the toy oven during her play with the dollhouse. Then she would go on and play with the rest of the family dolls and have fun. Mary did this for six months on a weekly basis. Then one day she stopped so I delicately asked her, "Do you feel different about your mother today?" and she said, "I'm not mad at mama anymore for leaving daddy." The initial interview with the parents had revealed that they were getting divorced and they wanted me to see Mary to help her deal with the divorce. The healing function of play is observed directly in play therapy. Mary was hurt and in terrible emotional pain. She could not talk to her mother or father and she felt too much shame to talk to her friends. The problem was too complicated to talk about with me as the therapist until she could work it out for herself through play. When I asked her if she felt differently about mother now, she smiled and her face shone. She talked nonstop during the next three sessions about her feelings and thoughts. The play had helped her to get distance between herself and her feelings so that she could integrate them into a different experience of herself and her family. Being able to play out her inner drama with laughter and humor and to have a witness in psychotherapy made her feel recognized as a person and helped her feel competent. Mary's self worth and competence is what children learn through regular play as well. Playing gave Mary permission to experiment with her family and peers in a nonthreatening way to learn her own boundaries and the boundaries of the other people. When parents see their children acting out their likes and dislikes through play they are much more tolerant than if these likes and dislikes were being expressed directly. Mary's free self-exploration through play therapy enhanced her flexibility and creativity in dealing with her everyday lived life.

Playing with peers inevitably leads to conflicts that the children learn to work through by playing and pretending to take on different roles. This helps them learn to integrate their point of view with those of their companions. Through play they get social strokes from peers to be flexible. Children who do not learn to play with peers are more rigid in their life and have a more difficult time dealing with conflict. These children cannot see the viewpoints of their friends.

Friendship is more important in play than mere acquaintance. When children have conflict with acquaintances they seem to learn less about interpersonal skills than when they have conflict with friends. Children tolerate more criticism from friends, they get more feedback about their behavior and they learn better interpersonal skills. Experiences of self-control and seeing the viewpoint of others are important factors in a child's life. Learning to communicate and to take different roles through play is as important as air and food to a child's survival.

Good peer relationships are very important to the health of the child. Poor peer relationships indicate that a child is having problems. More popular children, who have better peer attachment than children who are not well liked and have very few friends, seem to have more empathy and altruism than their less social peers. Better peer relationships depend on the child being able to pretend and use their imagination in helping them to bond with playmates. Children who play well with their friends and are encouraged to play alone at times have more experiences at play that encourage self awareness, self expression and versatility.

Another example of play therapy clearly shows the value of solitary and group play to work through emotional problems. The celebration of play is just as effective in facilitating mental health and good interpersonal skills in the personal lives of children and their family as it is in psychotherapy.

Through symbolic play a child is able to express anger, sadness, jealousy, joy, love and other complex or difficult emotions. Bobby came into the therapy playroom and went directly to the dollhouse. Right away Bobby took the father doll, put him on the roof and shoved him off, acting like he killed him. Then he found the teenage male doll and pretended he was beating his teenage brother. He told me "my father is mean to me and my brother hits me when my parents leave him in charge." He did this for four sessions, talking about his father's verbal abuse and his brother being too bossy to him. These sessions lead to family play therapy with role-playing and family sculpturing, which is a playful way to act out the basic relationships within a family. It involves a lot of laughter, silliness and humor, which allows the family to deal with painful emotions. As family members place each other in positions that show how they see each other, there is much laughter and joy. In one session of family sculpturing the older brother placed his mother and brother sitting very closely together on the couch, with the mother's arm around Bobby's shoulder. The teenager said, "That's the way they always are," indicating that he felt excluded from his mother's love and angry at Bobby. Family participation in role-playing and family sculpturing released the family into creative play that alleviated and channeled the family anger into a healthy and safe means of expression. This example shows the value of family play and individual play for conflict resolution.

The child needs to play to grow. Our children are not a hindrance to us; they are literally our healing because they show us how to play. Parents need to play, to be silly, to laugh, to pretend, to include humor in their lives in order to release their inner child and to be healthy. A child's ability to have fun, to be curious and to care brings out our feelings of deep love for them and for our families and to care for the people in our communities. The United Nations Charter that demands that play is an inalienable right of children is intuitively saying that play is as important as food and air for all of us. It is by play that we learn to channel the destructive aspects of our human nature and transform our anger into love. Play is needed for all of us to feel creative, spontaneous and open to the flourishing of life in the global village.