Integrating Play in Family Therapy

This workshop will provide clinicians with essential tools and knowledge to integrate family systems practices with play therapy interventions. We will focus on how to tailor family therapy to engage and support children and their caregivers. Participants will develop a deeper understanding of how to match play therapy practices with the emotional and cognitive abilities of children according to their developmental stages. Evidence based play therapy tools and interventions will be presented and discussed using case material. You will learn specific play methodologies to integrate into family therapy including: the use of animals as metaphors, exploring timelines of problems and solutions through storytelling, family games, sand tray, and art activities to assess and impact family functioning.

We will apply playful interventions in the context of Therapy Training Boston’s six phases of a transtheoretical family therapy session: joining, problem identification, information gathering, redefining the problem in systems terms, feedback, and contracting. Liz will describe the purposes and principles of each phase of effective family meetings. Sumayya will describe specific activities to use in each phase of the family work. She will help participants understand how to use playful strategies to accomplish goals of a variety of family systems therapy models.

Participants will discuss potential family scenarios in small groups. They will develop strategies to enhance their family therapy sessions with children by using the workshop material.

Statement of Need for this Training: Many practitioners are unaware of how to address the nuanced needs of children as they present in family therapy. The family therapy literature and training mostly address systems with adolescents and adults. When children are involved, treatment needs to be expanded to meet a range of levels of development: neurologically, cognitively, and emotionally. Children and families are at a disadvantage when these needs are not taken into consideration. When children’s needs are addressed with age and developmentally appropriate play, new resources emerge in the family system as limits to creative problem solving are dissolved.