Content area
Full text
PLAY IN FAMILY THERAPY (2nd ed.). Eliana Gil. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2015. Pp. 202.
PLAY THERAPY WITH CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS IN CRISIS (41th ed.). Nancy Boyd Webb (Ed). New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2015. Pp. 440.
SHORT-TERM PLAY THERAPY FOR CHILDREN (3rd ed.). Heidi Gerard Kaduson and Charles E. Schaefer (Eds.). New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2015. Pp. 384. Reviewed by Bethany Claes (Roberts Wesleyan College/Rochester, NY)
Play therapy is increasingly recognized as developmentally appropriate best practice for conducting psychological therapy with children. Though there is a unifying set of principles that distinguish play therapy from the adult-oriented therapeutic counterparts, there are many different acceptable approaches to play therapy. The kind of play therapy chosen may be impacted by theoretical orientation or diagnosis of the child/specific needs of the child. As a result, there are a plethora of resources for clinicians utilizing play therapy, to assist the clinician in fine-tuning their skill set to specific goals. Three of these resources will be reviewed together, each book with its own specific focus, including utilizing play as part of family therapy, play techniques for children and adolescents in crisis, and short-term play therapy.
Heidi Gerard Kadusen and Charles E. Shaefer provide the broadest appeal of the books to be reviewed, in their book Short-Term Play Therapy for Children (3rd ed.). This book provides the reader with a variety of adaptations that can be made to shorten play therapy for specific populations. The bulk of the chapters are focused on describing short-term therapy techniques for use in individual play therapy. Some examples include: cognitive-behavioral play for children with anxiety and...