Abstract
One of the prerequisites of child care is the use of play as a tool for clinical care, a practice also known as ludotherapy. When the child plays freely representing the daily activities of his/her own routine, he/she tends to reproduce what he/she lives in everyday life. In play, the child expresses feelings, wishes, and desires that, many times, are not expressed verbally. Playing is a class of responses subject to functional analysis and behavioral management just like any other class of responses. Through play, children develop their ability to observe and describe what happens around them, increasing their knowledge of themselves and of others. Functional play in the assessment phase involves the emission of responses typical of the behavioral repertoire of the child under analysis, allowing clinical behavior analysis for children to analyze functions of such responses, and can also be used as an aid in installing new repertoire during the intervention phase. This chapter lists six possible functions of play to be used in psychotherapy, either as part of the assessment or the intervention itself.
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Notes
- 1.
It is possible that understanding the concept of a higher order (or second order) class of behavior may help the clinical behavior analysis for children in training to generalize their functional play repertoire. For further exploration, we suggest reading the ninth chapter of Catania (1999).
- 2.
The fairy door is a small wooden door (or other material, like EVA, for example) that is used by the first author to connect the real world with an imaginary world of the child, bringing several possibilities of intervention. The child can write to the fairy about something they have difficulty with, which may or may not be part of the complaint, and they can share with the fairy some situation they have experienced. The child’s drawing or letter is answered by the fairy when she passes by to pick up what the children leave for her, without having a certain day or time.
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Chamati, A.B., Dahás, L. (2022). Functional Play: Ways to Conduct and the Development of Skills of the Clinical Behavior Analyst for Children. In: Rossi, A.S.U., Linares, I.M.P., Chagas Brandão, L. (eds) Clinical Behavior Analysis for Children. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12247-7_7
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