SSLD Play Intervention Program
Objectives of the program
To help parents learn how to play with their own children to facilitate:
- child-parent relationship building,
- the child's articulation and expression of emotional experience and needs
- the child's (re)construction of reality to achieve integrated experience, personal growth, and balanced development.
Play from a SSLD Perspective
- Play is purposive behaviour, which is motivated by or functionally related to, the child's needs. It is therefore possible to access the child's needs through playing with the child, and/or observing the child's play.
- The motivational basis of play can be biological needs, such as those for sensory stimulation and activity. For example, auto-stimulation behaviours, including those manifested by children with developmental challenges (e.g., flipping, spinning), can often be understood as functional in that they offer pleasurable sensory experience to the child. Like any motivated behaviour, these behaviours will usually stop on its on accord when satiation or fatigue is reached, or when reactive inhibition is built up. Activity is another biological need that is experienced by all human beings. Many play activities manifested by children are related to the need to be active, which is often associated with pleasurable sensory experience. Adults also engage in many types of play that satisfy the need for activity or pleasurable sensation.
- Play behaviours are often cognitive mediated, or mediated by the child's information processing system. At a very basic level, like the auto-stimulation mentioned above, the child is receiving feedback regarding her or his behaviour in terms sensory information mediated by the brain. Beyond this basic level, play behaviours are often associated with meaning and purpose. As children grow, play behaviours often reflect increasingly complex or sophisticated cognitive structures. In practice, we often encounter play activities articulating rich and layered symbolic meanings and personal significance.
- A related point is the notion of creativity, which can be seen as a cognitive or mental facility. Allowing the child to be creative, such as encouraging a child to approach, handle, or manipulate objects and toys in unconventional ways, can contribute to the expansion of the range of imaginable responses associated with specific objects and toys, thereby reinforcing a more diverse and flexible cognitive approach to objects and situations.
- Play behaviors are often connected with emotional experience. They can be direct expression of emotions like joy, fear, ambivalence, or sadness, remorse, or loss. They can sometimes help the child to access emotions that they are not fully aware of, or that are not well-articulated. Play activity can allow the child to access, articulate, express, ventilate, or work through various emotions, including those that are difficult to present or those that are regulated or inhibited by social norms or rules. Play activities can either directly create an interpersonal or social space for emotional communication and negotiation, such as when the child is negotiating freedom and control while playing with a parent, or it can create a virtual space through symbolic representation (e.g., doll house, blocks, animal figures, muppets/ puppets, etc.), which then allows the child to play out, negotiate, and reconstruct emotional experiences and relationships.
- Following from the above, play activities often involves an interpersonal or social context. From a SSLD perspective, play is a medium through which a lot of social learning takes place. The learning can include role-taking, following and applying rules, self-presentation, interpersonal communication, relationship building, problem solving, creative strategies, and so on.
- This is closely tied to the fact that play behaviours, including those seen as spontaneous, are often a result of social learning. Children learn to play in specific ways from an early age, for intervention from other adults and older children is almost inevitable in the growing up process of most children. Such intervention structures or conditions the child's play behaviour, or sometime provides opportunity for modeling. The structuring and conditioning can occur through less visible processes such as the choice of toys or objects made available to the child, encouragement or restriction of certain behaviours, and enforcing specific patterns, ways to handle objects or to play with a given toy, or rules.
- From a SSLD perspective, a key objective in adult participation or intervention in a child's play is to expand, rather than to restrict, the child's repertoire of responses. A more specific focus is on exploring the needs of the child, and then helping the child to acquire new strategies and skills to meet those needs through the medium of play.
- More specifically, in SSLD play intervention, the child's play activity provides an opportunity for behavioural assessment and problem translation. Through playing with the child and/or careful observation of the child's play, we can arrive at an understanding of the child's needs and major concerns. We can gain an understanding of the child's current strategies in meeting her or his needs or in addressing her or his concerns. We can also explore alternative strategies together with the child, sometimes demonstrating or modeling component of strategies or skills that the child is to develop.
- Learning can occur through play in all the domains of the child's functioning and experience, including the biological, motivational, cognitive, emotional, behavioural, interpersonal and social. The change processes in SSLD play intervention include behavioural coaching, cognitive reconstruction, management of emotional experience and expression, interpersonal communication, instrumental social skills, and so on. The learning process can include observation learning, cognitive reframing, alternative articulation, developing emotional access, emotional regulation, emotional articulation and expression,
Structure and Format of the Program
- A small number (around 10) of child-parent dyads will be recruited to join a SSLD Play Intervention Program Group. The group will be led by one or more practitioners trained in the SSLD Play Intervention procedure.
- The program is run in a setting that provides a spacious play area, well equipped with necessary toys and facilities. An observation area with one-way mirror or close-circuit TV is normally required.
- The program usually consists of weekly sessions of 2 to 2.5 hours each, and extends over 8 to 12 weeks.
- Child-minding service will be provided throughout the program period.
- Parents will learn to observe and analyze their own play interaction through playing with their own child in-session, with video-recording, playback and review together with the SSLD Practitioners (Trainers) and participating parents.
- Play sessions can be one-on-one, or in a small group involving more than one child-parent dyad. The Trainer(s) may sometime participate in a play sessions to facilitate learning.
- Such observation, analysis, and feedback from the Trainers and other participants will facilitate the parents' learning and development of new strategies and skills that will allow them to develop better relationships with their children, and to assist their children in their growth and development through the medium of play.
- The child involved in the play session is allowed to attend the feedback and review session. This format avoids the speculation/suspicion of secrecy among adults, and recognizes the child's right and capacity to know. We do not assume the child is not interested in or unable to understand the analysis, review, and feedback process. The child is, however, not made to attend. Instead, the child will be given the choice to attend, or just be present, or to join other children in the child-minding area. The child can participate by asking questions, making comments, or giving feedback.
- The learning process will be complemented by homework assignments and home-practice sessions.
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