WHy play therapy can improve more than language skills
Play therapy is an engaging and interactive way to address speech and language delays. It’s easy to target lots of of areas. With a simple farm set or mini objects, I have worked on following directions, sentence expansion, categories, object function, verbs, and present progressives. Playing with toys is far more engaging than paper tasks for kids. There’s lot of opportunities to hear their spontaneous language, and you can get a good idea of a child’s language and articulation skills during play.
But there’s more benefits to play based therapy beyond improving language skills. Research has found that play therapy can decrease challenging behaviors and improve self efficacy (Loeb et al, 2021).
In this study, clinicians used play therapy-oriented approaches while interacting with children who presented with language developmental disorders and ‘behavioral problems’, such as attention problems, anxiety, and emotional reactivity. Instead of praising kids with phrases like ‘good job!”, they would say ‘you worked hard on that’. They reflected instead of interpreted behavior (for example, saying ‘You seem happy’ vs ‘You’re happy right now’). They commented on a child’s actions instead of telling them what to do. The purpose of this was to teach children how to explore and communicate their feelings.
The results of this study showed that the children improved their intelligibility (how well a child is understood), increased their vocabulary, and spoke in more complete sentences.
Helping a child become a more confident and independent communicator is important. And if therapists tweak their therapy approaches to a more child-lead, play based therapy, it’s possible we can help them become independent communicators even sooner.
