Fillial

Filial Therapy is an approach used by play therapists to train parents to be therapeutic agents with their own children. Parents are taught basic child-centered play therapy principles and skills, including reflective listening, recognizing and responding to children’s feelings, therapeutic limit setting, building children’s self-esteem, and structuring required weekly play sessions with their children using selected toys. The therapist typically utilizes demonstration play sessions, role-playing, group discussion, videotapes, and supervision in a supportive atmosphere to educate parents. Parents learn how to create a warm, nonjudgmental, unconditionally accepting, and understanding environment in which their child feels safe to explore the parent-child relationship and themselves, including fears, desires, feelings, and struggles.

Communication gaps between parents and children may exist because many parents are unaware of their children’s emotional needs and lack the skills necessary to interact effectively with them on an emotional level. Children communicate through play. It is their innate language. By teaching parents the language of play, and how to use play therapeutically, the communication gap between parent and child can be closed.

Filial therapy is an alternative method for treating emotionally disturbed children in which the parent is used as an ally in the therapeutic process. Parental involvement in a child’s developmental process facilitates the parent’s motivation to continue sessions and thus tends to eliminate the typical parental resistance that is encountered when the parent is not involved in the child’s therapy.

When children are permitted to express themselves without losing status in the eyes of their parents the children’s

anxiety diminishes. The child feels validated and valued,

and is able to master difficulties and feelings rather than try to distort and deny them. As these changes occur and the child experiences the parent in a new manner, the child begins to understand his or her sense of worth. Frustrations and hostilities diminish as the communication gap is bridged.

The parent learns to set limits on the child’s behavior when needed. While maintaining acceptance of the child’s feelings and desires, the parent learns to facilitate the child’s expression in socially appropriate manners rather than overt, disruptive, harmful means.