Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Play therapy
Summary
Play therapy refers to a range of methods of capitalising on children's natural urge to explore and harnessing it to meet and respond to the developmental and later also their mental health needs. It is also used for forensic or psychological assessment purposes where the individual is too young or too traumatised to give a verbal account of adverse, abusive or potentially criminal circumstances in their life.
Play therapy is extensively acknowledged by specialists as an effective intervention in complementing children's personal and inter-personal development. Play and play therapy are generally employed with children aged six months through late adolescence and young adulthood. They provide a contained way for them to express their experiences and feelings through an imaginative self-expressive process in the context of a trusted relationship with the care giver or therapist. As children's and young people's experiences and knowledge are typically communicated through play, it is an essential vehicle for personality and social development.
In recent years, play therapists in the western hemisphere, as a body of health professionals, are usually members or affiliates of professional training institutions and tend to be subject to codes of ethical practice.
According to Jean Piaget, "play provides the child with the live, dynamic, individual language indispensable for the expression of [the child’s] subjective feelings for which collective language alone is inadequate."
Play helps a child develop a sense of true self and a mastery over their innate abilities resulting in a sense of worth and aptitude. During play, children are driven to meet the essential need of exploring and affecting their environment. Play also contributes in the advancement of creative thinking. Play likewise provides a way for children to release strong emotions. During play, children may play out challenging life experiences by re-engineering them, thereby discharging emotional states, with the potential of integrating every experience back into stability and gaining a greater sense of mastery.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.