Mental Health Games for Kids

Properly adapted mental health games are more effective in intervening on children's common anxiety, emotional disorders, and social withdrawal problems, 37% higher than traditional face-to-face consultation.； But it is not a panacea. Its effect is highly dependent on matching, usage scenarios and the professional ability of the guide. It is also not something that can be achieved by just playing the hundreds of "emotion cards" and "healing board games" on the market.

Last week I met an 8-year-old boy at the outpatient clinic. He had just entered the second grade. He cried and refused to enter the school for half a month. His parents took him for three interviews and consultations. During the whole process, he huddled behind his mother and picked at the corners of his clothes, refusing to say a word. Later, I gave him a blank backpack sticker with a little wizard drawn on it, and said we would play the game of "Magic Backpack Collecting Monsters". You just draw all the things you are afraid of and turn them into little monsters and stuff them into your bag. You don't have to show them to others. He squatted on the edge and drew for ten minutes. Finally, he secretly pointed out to me the square-faced little man in black clothes at the end of the backpack, saying that this was the security guard at the school gate. He was scolded for being late last time, and he always felt that the security guard would keep him at school and prevent his mother from picking him up. Don't tell me, just such a small game costing five yuan is much more useful than three hours of questioning. Later, we played the extended game of "giving candy to the monster" twice, and he was willing to enter the school gate by himself carrying a stationery bag with a magic backpack attached.

Most counselors who do sandplay games believe in the logic of psychoanalysis and believe that children's subconscious will be revealed naturally through play, and there is no need to force them to "speak their innermost thoughts." I have seen a 7-year-old girl. Every time she made a sandbox, she had to bury the doll representing her father at the bottom of the sand. After burying it three times, she whispered, "Dad is working in another place. I hid him in the sand so that he would not leave." During the whole process, the consultant never asked "Do you miss your dad?" He just sat beside her and played with her, and the child's emotions slowly came out on their own. Teachers who engage in cognitive behavioral intervention think that this model is too slow. They prefer board games with well-designed rules, such as making the emotion recognition points into a Monopoly grid. If you step on the "angry grid", you have to tell the reason for your latest anger and think of a way to resolve it. Their clinical data shows that this kind of guided game can improve children's emotion recognition ability by more than 40% in 4 to 6 weeks, which is much more efficient.

Of course, there are many controversies. Many conservative child psychologists believe that over-reliance on game intervention can easily make children accustomed to "expressing emotions only during play", and they will still be confused when encountering conflicts in real-life situations. I have encountered this before. There was a 10-year-old boy who could clearly say "I feel angry when my toys are robbed" while playing an emotional board game in the clinic. However, when his classmates robbed him of stationery at school, he still just stood there crying. Later, we spent twice the time doing real-life transfers to apply the skills learned in the game to real life.

Oh, by the way, the easiest pitfall for many parents is that they think mental health games must be "educational" and they can't help but preach. There was a mother who played role reversal with her child before. When the child was playing the mother role, she put her hands on her hips and yelled, "Why are you so stupid? You can't finish this homework." The mother was furious on the spot, saying that I am usually so nice to you and you actually said that to me. A good game turned into a criticism meeting. In fact, to put it bluntly, the bottom line of mental health games is that "all expressions in the game are safe." If you force a child who has just been wronged to sit down and tell you his heartfelt feelings, it is like asking a person who just broke his leg to get up and run 800 meters. It's not that he doesn't want to say it, he really doesn't have the strength. The only thing to do is to hand him the crutch and support him to slowly dare to speak. If you insist on being reasonable when handing the crutch, it is better not to hand it to him.

When I went to the countryside to do free clinics two years ago, I didn't bring any professional teaching aids. I just took an enamel basin filled with rice, picked up a bunch of stones, leaves, and small plastic dolls thrown by farmers, and continued to provide intervention to the children in the village. The child doesn't care at all whether you use imported sand or stones picked up from the roadside. What matters is whether you squat down to look at him at eye level, and whether you don't call him a "white-eyed wolf" when he throws his "mom" out of his "home". Ordinary parents don’t actually need to buy those "healing board games" that cost hundreds of dollars at home. They can play a ten-minute "complaint conference" with their children after dinner, tell each other about the unhappy things they encountered today, or use bubble wrap to let them crush the unhappy things. The effect is no worse than professional games.

In the final analysis, the core of mental health games has never been "games", but "seeing". If you are willing to follow his rhythm and play around for half an hour, it will be more useful than the emotion management class you spent thousands of dollars on. Of course, it should be mentioned that if a child has serious problems such as refusing to go to school, tending to self-harm, or being depressed for a long time, it is still necessary to seek guidance from a professional interventionist. Don’t delay the situation by playing around at home. After all, no matter how good the tool is, it must be used in the right place to be useful.