I found the most interesting
idea in these two chapters to be the idea of play as a sort of coping mechanism. On pages 107 and 108 Golomb talks about an
18-month-old boy who played both with a spool and in the mirror to cope with
the disappearance of his mother. His mother’s leaving distressed him and caused
him to have anxiety, which seems to be a common occurrence in children. Golomb explains “by playing games of disappearance and reappearance he mastered his
anxiety and reassured himself that his mother would also return”. learning or knowing this coping
strategy at this age seems like it would be very helpful in the future when
anxiety like this would reappear if not already taken care of at a younger age.
Golomb revisits this
idea in the section about play therapy, pages 129 through 131, in my opinion,
when she talks about play helping children to “express some of his or her
concerns”. I think the whole idea of
acting out a problem repeatedly to deal with the stress and anxiety it causes
is extremely sophisticated and amazing to come naturally to children of such a
young age. I never learned to do this for the separation anxiety specifically,
I remember back to when I was 6 being filled with anxiety and convinced that my
parents had died as that seemed the only logical reason for their tardiness.
I don't remember what I did as a child when my parents would leave me behind with a babysitter, but I am a babysitter now, and every time the parents leave they seem convinced that they are never going to return! It's interesting to see the correspondence of this idea with the simple games children play such as peek-a-boo. Do you think children who's parents leave more often have the tendency to play these games more often?
ReplyDeleteYour statement about children coping with their problems as being a helpful tool for teachers to understand is, in my opinion, very important! I too agree that the coping process needs to be talk to students/ children even if they do not particularly need to use it at this time. Later in life, this learned coping process can come in handy when dealing with multiple issues. I child can use this process to better his assignment that he had procrastinated on or even use this tool to deal with recieving a poor score on a test or assignment. Teaching students how to deal with events in their life can be very helpful to the education process because if the child is not coping with issues beforehand, the issues are brought to school and then the child does not put his full attention to the material being taught and thus causing more problems.
ReplyDeleteI think you brought up some interesting points about the disappear/reappear being a coping method that will benefit the young boy in the future in the future. I wonder what the adult or adolescence version of this would be? Like Kayla mentioned in her comment, I also don't remember what I did when my parents left me with someone else as a child, but I still have anxiety about being in a big house by myself.
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