Morgan Ferqueron: Who Said Therapy Was All Fun and Games

Most people will go to therapy at some point in their lives, but some of us go a lot sooner than others. Therapy for children is different from therapy for adults. It’s usually a lot more active because most kids aren’t going to sit and talk to you for a whole hour–at least, not about what you need them to talk about. Even if they do want to talk, it’s hard for kids to find the words to understand and express their emotions, much less explain it to someone else. So for child therapy you often have to get creative. How do you get a child to answer difficult questions when they want to play? The answer is simple. You play.

One of the child therapy sessions that I sat in on was with a little boy around six. He had so much energy, and unfortunately, he also had one of the shortest attention spans I have ever witnessed. This dynamic duo promised a challenging session, but thankfully, the lead therapist dealt with this kind of thing daily. As a veteran school psychologist, she had several tricks up her sleeve to ensure a productive and fun session. I had hoped the tricks would be of the magical variety, but that wasn’t exactly what she had in mind for this session. I, however, would be filing that idea away for my future sessions.

The first approach involved a big box of crayons and a stack of blank paper. We’ve all seen the ‘draw-me-a-picture’ technique portrayed in movies and tv shows. It’s like a staple of child therapy, and the boy seemed to love this technique– for all of three minutes. Two questions into a session, and we already needed a back up plan.

So as any good therapist does, the lead therapist offered a compromise. For every question he answered, we would all play a game. The boy seemed super excited about this, and in a show of good faith, he started to answer questions for us again. In return, we played hide and seek, charades, and even made paper airplanes. As unconventional as it seemed, this therapy session allowed us to get the information that we needed. I couldn’t wait until the next child therapy session that I would sit in on, so that we could do this again.

However, there was one child therapy session that I was a part of that was a complete 180 from the therapy playdates I had before. This child, also a boy, was a few years older than the last, perhaps around nine. He was polite, reserved, and apparently desperately in love with a girl in his class. When his mother explained that was part of the reason he was coming to therapy, I have to admit I didn’t quite understand the concern. What child didn’t have an elementary school romance on the playground?

However, the lead therapist and I quickly understood what she meant once we got into the session. While the other boy we saw had been rambunctious and carefree, this boy was uptight and sentimental. I had never met a child that was so emotionally mature before– in fact, I have trouble recalling high school students with the same level of emotional maturity. He really was in love, but he was also distraught about his relationship.

It didn’t seem like playing games was going to be helpful in this session which really threw me off. I thought that child therapy was going to be active and games based like the examples I’d seen before in class and movies. This kid, however, had a lot of big emotions that needed sorting out, and as much fun as legos are, they don’t fix a heartache.

The lead therapist spent the rest of the session talking to the boy almost as if he was a tiny adult. He even gave him what therapists call ‘homework,’ which is stuff you’re supposed to do outside of the sessions on your own. I didn’t even know we could give kids therapy homework, so that was news to me.

Going into my internship, I had a preconceived idea about what I thought child therapy was supposed to be. We were supposed to draw pictures, play games, and use smiley faces to talk about emotions. The real world isn’t always going to be like that though. I thought being a child therapist would involve play therapy, and for the most part, that was right. It isn’t going to work for every kid though, and what surprised me the most is how similar to adult therapy you can get in a child session.

This experience reminded me how important it is to be flexible with your plans going into a session. If we didn’t assess the situation properly and tried doing the same techniques for both of these kids, then it wouldn’t have worked out. Therapy is a customizable experience, and that’s the way it should be.

Morgan Ferqueron is a senior Psychology major with a minor in Child and Family Studies. She is graduating in May 2022. For her breakaway she interned at a local private practice, Synergy Counseling of Greenwood. After graduation, she plans to get her master’s in Applied Clinical Psychology.