For a child, illness and hospital stays can mean an everyday life filled with new environments, unfamiliar people, and treatments that the child cannot control themselves. Examinations, medications, and medical equipment can be difficult to understand and just as difficult to explain.
Play can then take on an important function. Through play, the child can explore what is happening, express emotions, and make a foreign situation more understandable.
Play as the child's language
Children do not always have the words required to describe worry, fear, or difficult experiences. Instead, feelings and experiences can be expressed through play.
When a child plays "hospital," the child does not need to explain exactly how they feel. The story can instead be enacted by the doll.
The doll can be afraid before an examination, need medicine, or be comforted after a treatment.
Play gives the child the opportunity to approach the difficult at their own pace. Events can be repeated, changed, and given new endings. Things the child has previously experienced passively can become something the child gets to influence themselves.
What is play therapy and therapeutic play?
The terms play therapy, therapeutic play, and medical play are used in different ways. Formal play therapy is a form of treatment carried out by trained professionals. Therapeutic or medical play within pediatric healthcare can, among other things, be used to prepare children for examinations and help them process experiences from care.
For example, the child can examine a doll, put on a bandage, use a toy syringe, or play through a treatment. By first performing the procedure on the doll, the child can get a clearer picture of what is going to happen and an opportunity to ask questions.
Play does not replace medical or psychological treatment. However, it can serve as support for the child's understanding, participation, and emotional processing.
When the roles are reversed
A child living with illness often ends up in the role of the one being examined, helped, and taken care of. In doll play, the roles can be reversed.
The child gets to be the one who examines, makes decisions, comforts, and takes care of someone else. It is the child who decides what the doll feels, what is going to happen, and when the treatment is finished.
Play creates a space where the child gets to act and decide. It can provide an experience of control and agency in an everyday life where many decisions are otherwise made by adults.
What does the research show?
Research on play within pediatric healthcare shows promising results, particularly regarding anxiety and negative emotions in connection with hospital stays and medical treatments.
In a study of 304 children between 3 and 12 years old, the children who were allowed to participate in hospital-based play interventions showed less anxiety and fewer negative emotions than children who received standard care. The study was published in BMC Pediatrics.
The doll as an intermediary
The doll can function as an intermediary between the child and what is difficult to talk about. Instead of describing their own fear, the child can show that the doll is afraid. By comforting the doll, the child can simultaneously explore what safety and care mean.
Doll play can also give adults an opportunity to listen and notice the child's questions. The important thing is to give the child time, materials, and space to direct the story. When an adult participates, the child's initiative should be at the center. Play loses some of its function if the adult decides what the doll should feel or how the story should end.
The importance of inclusive dolls
For a child to be able to enact their own everyday life, play needs to accommodate different bodies and experiences. A doll with, for example, a diabetes sensor, hearing aid, PEG tube, or scar can make it possible to include things that are otherwise rarely seen among toys.
Inclusive doll play is about which roles the child gets the opportunity to take on. In play, the child can get to be the one who understands, decides, acts, and takes care of someone else. That is where doll play can find its special power: the child gets to create their own story about what is happening and decide for themselves how it should continue.