Children's Use of Board Games in Psychotherapy

Play with structure board games is developmentally appropriate for latency-age children but is seldom discussed in the child therapy literature or seen as therapeutically useful. This book describes ways that structured board games can reveal the internal psychodynamic working of the child and can be understood as projective material. Clinical examples of children's play reveal parallels between their dramatic and their board-game play. Both show unconscious content, defensive needs, and interpersonal and transferential relationships. As therapists, we can search for the same underlying dynamics we would look for in these other symbolic expressions."This book also discusses a child's developmental changes and how the dramatic, magical play of childhood is replaced by the structured, rule-oriented play of the middle years. Therapists must sensitively follow hem in this development, rather than force them to continue the more regressed play of childhood or push them prematurely into the verbal world of adolescents and adults. Children's Use Of Board Games in Psychotherapy demonstrates ways to work with the material which children give us at this stage, even when expressed in the form of structured games.