Art Therapy for Children
Learn how and why therapists are using Art Therapy with Children...
For children, playing and making art are synonymous. Both activities represent children's attempts at taking control of their environments, stretching their imaginations, exploring possibilities, and forming or discovering who they are - finding "self" as defined by their creations. (see also Childhood Developmental Psychology).
Art Therapy Resources
It's for these reasons that trained art therapists bring together psychotherapy and its theories and interventions with the artistic process to help children with various conditions.
Why art?
A common approach in psychotherapy is to have patients sit face to face with a therapist for in-depth discussions. But children rarely sit and discuss anything with anyone for long periods of time, least of all troubling or traumatic experiences. Besides their limited vocabularies, they aren't able to talk of complex feelings or concepts that even adults struggle to articulate. (see Anxiety in Children).
Art provides a natural medium for children to communicate. Drawing or painting pictures enables them to spontaneously and genuinely draw how they're feeling. The images they draw are most likely metaphors - tornados, fires, empty houses - literally anything to depict thoughts or feelings that are too painful to describe in words.
Additionally, when children experience trauma, they often bury it in their subconscious, where it can surface years later to affect them. Through art therapy, children bring these buried traumas into their artworks, allowing therapists to help children work through trauma, and begin the recovery process. (see also Child Abuse Social Work).
Conditions addressed with art therapy for children:
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How does art therapy for children work?
In an article for OncoLog, "Art Therapy Helps Children Affected by Cancer Express Their Emotions," Estala A. Beale, M.D., described the art therapy process used with cancer patients.
An eight-year-old boy drew a picture of a person parachuting from an airplane over water filled with triangles that represented sharks. The plane is on fire, explained the patient, and about to explode. An empty boat also sits on the water - which the child said also might be dangerous.
"Because of his illness, this child sees his life as threatened, and there is nowhere to turn for solace, encouragement, or hope," said Dr. Beale, a child and adult psychiatrist and associate professor in the Department of Neuro-Oncology at The University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
The article described how an art therapist in this situation would not tell the boy that the plane isn't going to burn, and that he doesn't have to worry - this would not address the child's terror. Instead the therapist would work with the child to find alternative solutions to this terror or fear the child is feeling because of his illness, beginning by helping the child find safety for the man and the parachute.
In this way, artwork is a type of displacement, or a way of helping the child work out fear by helping the subject in his painting. This separates the boy from his own internal fears, allowing him to find creative alternatives that he can eventually apply to his own life.
Regardless of the trauma, illness, or condition, art therapists who work with children are there to give these kids hope. Most children haven't yet built up the inhibitions many adults feel about creating art, seeing it as a form of play, creating freely and expressing themselves without worry or self-consciousness.
If you desire to work with children as an art therapist, helping them heal and recover through the creative process, request information from schools offering degrees in Art Therapy or from schools offering counseling degree programs. Art therapy positions working with children usually require a master's degree, and some states require licensing. Positions are available in hospitals and healthcare clinics, educational organizations, nonprofits, and community service organizations.
Sand Tray Therapy
Sometimes art therapy isn’t fitting the particular needs of a client or patient, yet “talk therapy” isn’t appropriate either – especially for children. That’s when a therapist alters the technique, employing another type of expressive therapy called sand tray therapy.
Similar to play therapy, the therapist observes the client as he or she plays with miniature figures situated in a tray of sand, measuring about 3’ x 2’ x 3", creating a “world” in this nonthreatening, bounded environment. The miniatures are replicas of human characters, plants, animals, mythical and frightening figures, buildings, fences, and other architectural symbols.
Clients freely build a world as the therapist observes, revealing as much or little as they choose, and through this recreation, the therapist understands the individual’s perceptions of the world, and any problems or issues.
Sand tray therapy diminishes a client’s inhibitions over artistic abilities by providing ready-made symbols and images. By dialoguing as the client creates, solutions and resolutions to challenges emerge. It all happens entirely with the use of symbols and metaphors, and has proven so effective with children, that it’s now also used with adults and adolescents.