The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education presents various theories of play and demonstrates how it serves communicative, developmental, and relational functions, highlighting the importance and development of the capacity to play in terms useful to early childhood educators. The book explicitly links trauma, development, and interventions in the early childhood classroom specifically for teachers of young children, offering accessible information that can help teachers better understand the meanings of children's expressive acts. Contributors from education, psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology explore techniques of play, how cultural influences affect how children play, the effect of trauma on play, factors that interfere with the ability to play, and how to apply these ideas in the classroom. They also discuss the relevance of ideas about playfulness for teachers and other professionals. The Imprtance of Play in Early Childhood Education will be of great interest to teachers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists as well as play therapists and developmental psychologists.

The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education presents various theories of play and demonstrates how it serves communicative, developmental, and relational functions, highlighting the importance and development of the capacity to play in terms useful to early childhood educators. The book explicitly links trauma, development, and interventions in the early childhood classroom specifically for teachers of young children, offering accessible information that can help teachers better understand the meanings of children's expressive acts. Contributors from education, psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology explore techniques of play, how cultural influences affect how children play, the effect of trauma on play, factors that interfere with the ability to play, and how to apply these ideas in the classroom. They also discuss the relevance of ideas about playfulness for teachers and other professionals. The Imprtance of Play in Early Childhood Education will be of great interest to teachers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists as well as play therapists and developmental psychologists.

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.