CLINICAL EDITOR’S COMMENTS:
Play therapists can help parents understand the risks of their own or their children’s excessive technology use and suggest setting appropriate appropriate limits around it.
A
s mental health professionals, play therapists are keenly aware of the constructs of Bowlby’s (1958, 1959, 1960, 1988) original attachment theory, upon which
Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978) expounded. Attachment theory recognizes that connections created in utero and during the earliest stages of
life indelibly shape our lives, remain prominent
throughout the human experience (Schore & Schore, 2012), and have the potential to impact neural synapses that wire the brain for connection (Badenoch, 2008; Schore, 2012). Secure attachments positively affect children’s mental health in many ways, including the ability to develop close and empathetic relationships with others.
Sensory and relational face-to-face experiences contribute to children’s formulation of an internal working model that prompts later social and emotional competencies (Schore, 2012; Small & Vorgan 2008). Parental sensitivity to children’s signals (e.g., soothing a crying child with rocking, returning a smile once the child has made eye contact, initiating a game of peek-a-boo or patty-cake with a curious child) is crucial for social- emotional and cognitive development (Bernier, Carlson, & Whipple, 2010). In a longitudinal study, Schoenmaker, Juffer, van IJzendoorn, Linting, van der Voort, and Bakersman-Kranenburg (2015) found a remarkable continuity of maternal sensitivity to children’s signals from infancy to 14 years of age among 190 adoptees, suggesting that early sensitivity shapes adult attachment representations.
In a movement labeled “modern” attachment theory, Schore and Schore (2012) proposed expanding Bowlby’s original theory to include research on brain development, wherein “secure attachment relationships are essential for creating a right brain self that can regulate its own internal states and external relationships” (p. 44). Parent and infant/child
attachment interactions are critical to the development of structural right brain neurobiological systems involved in emotion processing, stress modulation, self-regulation, and therefore the functional origins of the bodily-based implicit self (Schore, 2012). Thus, early attuned an infant have the capability of becoming a major organizer toward the establishment of secure attachments and healthy brain development (Courtney, Velasquez, & Bakai Toth, 2017). Brown (2009) posited that this type of joyful union between parent and infant “synchroniz[es] the neural activity in the right cortex of the brain” (p. 82), the relational side of the brain, for children and their parents.
Technology: A New Threat to Developing
Secure Attachments technology affects relationships. Technology can come between parents and their infants or children. Time spent with media decreases time spent doing other activities. Parents focused on technology may pay less attention to their infants and children, which may interfere with the attachment
relationship (Aiken, 2016). Kirkorian, Pempek,
Murphy, Schmidt, and Anderson (2009) found that even when parents and children spend time together, background television negatively affects the quantity and quality of interactions between them. Television viewing by young children is characterized by less frequent interactions with parents (Vandewater, Bickham, & Lee, 2006). In the presence of a television, researchers have found parents to be less attentive and less engaged, to spend less time speaking to their children, and to speak to them in shorter sentences (Christakis, 2009; Kirkorian et al., 2009).
www.a4pt.org | September 2018 | PLAYTHERAPY | 11
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
