When kids face challenges, they can get all kinds of therapeutic interventions at school and at home.
Ahead of the upcoming school year, educators, specialists and parents are calling for a more playful approach to helping children address hardship and even discipline.
That aligns with Devin Anglin’s viewpoint on the power of play as a means of communication, too.
“My trauma lens allows for me to understand, ‘Okay, this kid is yelling at me right now, but he's not yelling at me. He's yelling towards me because he doesn't know how to verbalize his emotions right now, so let me let that happen.’ Once it's done, what happens? ‘I'm sorry, Mr. Anglin, I didn't mean to yell at you.’ ... And now we're talking as we're cleaning up the room,” Anglin, a former crisis intervention specialist, said. “True story, by the way.”
Anglin is also the founder of Sankofa Leadership Associates and he facilitated a workshop on applying play in disciplinary settings during the Healthi Kids Coalition’s Playful Learning Summit this week.
Those moments of disruptive behaviors can also showcase a student’s abilities if looked at through a different lens, he said.
“How do we take those individual students, identify the skills that they have that may be showing up as a behavior, and then providing them with a positive solution to continue to build that skill?” Anglin said. “Rather than kicking them out of the classroom, isolating them in the back of the classroom, or completely taking play away from them.”
Discipline is often a space where the power of play is overlooked, Anglin said, and he encourages educators to create a playful culture with their students to foster personal growth and learning — because children learn and potentially heal through play.
According to multiple studies, therapeutic aspects of play can help enhance the self-esteem of children who are being bullied as well as mitigate bullying behaviors by creating a space for emotional release for anger, revenge, and other difficult emotions.
“(Play) is a dynamic process that enables children to express themselves in their own ways, to get in touch with other children, to become socialized. In contrast to adults, (it) is not an easy task for the children to express verbally their thoughts, their problems, their questions,” scholar Konstantinos Koukourikos wrote in a 2021 overview of play therapy. “They usually use play to express their concerns, their fears, their desires, and to communicate with their environment.”
Cherriese Bufis-Scott, director of Diverse Mosaic Community Center and a mother of five children, says she’s seen how children can struggle with self-worth — especially when being bullied.
“I think kids go through everything adults go through: anxiety, depression, lack of self-worth, all of the things,” Bufis-Scott said. “And when children feel that way, that's when you get at risk for suicide."
She says that came up for one of her children during sixth grade. Through that experience, she’s seen how play can become a life-saving intervention.
“When you when you activate their creativity, when you make them feel safe and protected in their surroundings, the things that they are capable of doing is unbelievable,” she said. “And they're really unstoppable little beings if we give them the ability to thrive.”
Bufis-Scott said introducing her son to things that made him happy — like games and sports — helped him cultivate resilience, and it gave him motivation to be in school. She said she hopes her son’s story can be a model for other parents and educators.
