Taking play seriously (Part 2)
The United Nations Children’s Fund or UNICEF strongly upholds the children’s right to play because apart from being one of children’s inalienable rights, play helps them explore, invent, create and learn to express their emotions. It is also used to engage poorest and marginalized children to have fun and enjoy, and to enhance child development, learning and encourage better academic performance.
As UNICEF Chief of Early Childhood Development Pia Rebella Britto says, “When the brains and bodies of young children are protected, nurtured and stimulated they have the best possible chance of developing fully, learning effectively, and contributing to their economies and societies when they reach adulthood.”
Unilab Foundation’s Play It Forward is a therapeutic play intervention for children in hospitals and vulnerable areas. As a scienceand evidence-based intervention, it combines play spaces and curriculum to maximize the therapeutic and developmental benefits of play. Its two sub-programs, Play It Forward -Wellness and Play It Forward-Resilience, provide psychosocial support to pediatric patients and to children in vulnerable areas such as post-disaster or disasterprone communities, respect i vel y.
In cases of children undergoing hospitalization and treatments in medical facilities, doctors and health experts note a high risk of trauma caused by the unpleasant experiences in hospitals, disruption of their everyday routine, the anxiety and stress caused by being in a different environment.
The results of study entitled “The Importance of Play During Hospitalization of Children” show that “during hospitalization, play either in the form of therapeutic play, or as in the form of play therapy, is proven to be of high therapeutic value for ill children, thus contributing to both their physical and emotional well-being and to their recovery.”
The conclusions of the said study also provide that through the use of play, children have the chance to gain control in many situations changing hospitalization into a positive rather than a negative experience.
PediaCaRE, the Pediatric Cardiac Rehabilitation Section of the Philippine Heart Center is one of the big projects supported by Play It Forward for wellness. The first of its kind in the Philippines and ASEAN, it is a specialized unit committed to getting eligible cardiac patients safely and confidently moving or ambulating. This is achieved through a well-supervised exercise program or Play Module to improve the physiologic status (initially, now including Psychosocial status) of pediatric cardiac pat i ent s.
The Kythe Child Life Program, a hospital-based, holistic approach that provides psychosocial support to the child and his or her family, has provided psychosocial support to over 11,000 children with cancer and other chronic illness and their families every year. This group of trained professionals providing the Child Life Program envisions to inspire hope and improve quality of life for hospitalized children that are suffering from cancer and other chronic illnesses by believing that the hospital is not only a place to heal; but also to love, play, learn, and grow.
The Child Life Program aims to alleviate the anxiety of pediatric patients who suffer from illness such as cancer, heart condition, kidney disease, and blood disorders by providing families with information on basic access to medicines and treatment. The approach to enabling families to cope with their children’s condition includes counseling and bereavement support.
Meanwhile, DepEd’s Psychological First Aid in the Education Sector is one of programs that utilize the play concept in terms of disaster situations. Schools, and the learners as well, being vulnerable to multiple hazards such as schools being used as evacuation centers, tropical cyclones, landslides, earthquakes, flooding, volcanic eruptions, armed conflicts, and other hazards, also need interventions to debrief and distress both the teachers and the students.
DepEd has produced the SEES (Supporting Enabling and Empowering Students) Teachers’Manual on Psychosocial Interventions for Secondary Schoolaged Students During Disasters and Emergency Situations to provide teachers and school officials the necessary information and guidance on how to provide Psychological First Aid to students and other affected members of the community. School DRRM Coordinators nationwide were also trained through a Capacity Building on Psychological First Aid under one of DepEd‘s key result area called Resilience Education.
Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the US National Institute for Play says: “Play is how we are made, how we develop and adjust to change. It can foster innovation, lead to multi-billion dollar fortunes. But in the end, the most significant aspect of play is that it allows us to express joy and connect more deeply with the best of ourselves and in others. If your life has become barren, play brings it to life again. Yes as Freud said, life is about love and work. Yet play transcends this. Play is the purest expression of love.”