Though nearly two years have passed since Hurricane
Katrina ravaged
the Gulf Coast, young children—those who watched as their homes and
communities were destroyed—still suffer from the effects of that trauma.
“Whenever a rain cloud passes overhead, young children here become
incredibly frightened,” says Pamela Mottley, an early childhood specialist
at Mississippi State University (MSU). “Some kids act out with aggression;
others can’t sleep at night because they are so afraid.”
To help Katrina’s youngest victims, Mottley and her team of researchers
and educators at MSU turned to Project
Joy. The Boston-based nonprofi
t has trained hundreds of preschool teachers and daycare providers
throughout the Northeast to help young children recover from trauma
through play.
“Play is a critical part of a child’s healthy development. It’s how kids explore their world. It’s how they rehearse for life’s challenges in a safe way,” says Steven Gross ‘90, Project Joy’s founder and director.
“When
children are traumatized, their fears keep them from playing. When
children stop playing, they stop growing. But with guidance from trusted
adults, they can learn how to play again.”
In the past year, Project Joy has trained more than 80 teachers in
45 preschools in Mississippi to use its therapeutic, play-based curriculum.
The aim is to reach every preschool along the Gulf Coast. Mottley,
who oversees the program’s implementation there, says that children
respond instantly to Project Joy. “I taught a class last week, and
the children squealed with joy as they played,” she says.
It’s exuberant physical play that offers great healing, says Gross.
Adults process and heal from traumas largely by talking about them.
But talk therapy doesn’t help kids. “Young children do not have the
verbal skills to process a traumatic experience by talking about it,”
he says. “Play is the language of children.”
Gross designed Project Joy’s curriculum with this in mind. Most sessions
begin with a teacher reading a storybook in which characters triumph
over fear and adversity or exhibit great altruism or resilience. Then
the teacher guides the children in acting out narratives from a story.
After reading the classic children’s book The
Little Engine That Could,
for instance, the children pretend to be little engines, carrying one
another around the play space in toy parachutes.
Running, leaping, and laughing their way through the warm-ups and activities,
children re-experience some of the same physiological states that occur
during a traumatic event— a racing heart rate, pumping adrenaline,
rapid breathing—but in an environment where they are safe and in control.
Dr. Robert Macy, a psychologist at the Trauma
Center in Brookline,
says this is the key to Project Joy’s effectiveness. Since Freud, psychologists
have used play to help children overcome psychological difficulties,
he says, but most traditional play therapies involve play with objects
or fine-motor play. “That kind of play therapy has limited results
with trauma,” says Macy. “You’ve got to mobilize the entire integrated
body and get the children moving.”
In the aftermath of the 1999
earthquake in Turkey that killed more
than 17,000 people and left another half-million homeless, Macy asked
Gross to help him develop a classroom-based trauma intervention for
Turkish children. Since then, the intervention has reached more than
250,000 child victims of trauma in nations such as Sudan, Eritrea,
and Palestine. Macy, who is conducting a large controlled study of
the intervention, says preliminary data shows that active play is one
very effective ingredient for helping children recover from traumatic
events.
The need for trauma intervention doesn’t just arise during times of
war or natural disaster. Dwayne Nunez, who teaches Project Joy at a
Head Start preschool program in Boston’s urban core, says his students
must cope with trauma daily. “Living where we live is a traumatic experience
in and of itself,” says Nunez. Some of his students are homeless. Others
go without food. All live with an ongoing threat of violence in the
streets.
Nunez says Project Joy provides the only opportunity for many of his
students to play in a safe environment. One little girl in his class,
who had lived in three foster homes before she came to the preschool,
“was extremely withdrawn, had problems with aggression, and was hitting
other children,” he says. After several weeks in his Project Joy sessions,
he watched the girl gain confidence and begin to play with other children.
Soon the difficult behavior disappeared. “She started doing so well
with her teachers and with the other kids. I don’t think she’d been
able to make friends before that,” Nunez says.
Gross has a trove of similar anecdotes from his 20 years as a play
therapist. He first experienced the power of play while in college
as a summer intern at the Academy
of Physical and Social Development,
an organization in Newton, Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating
from UMass Amherst with a business degree, he landed a grant to start
running therapeutic playgroups for homeless children. “I wanted to
reach the most vulnerable children, the ones who didn’t have any other
options,” says Gross, who later earned a master’s in social
work from Boston College.
Gross launched Project Joy in 1989, and for 16 years he conducted playgroups
himself. Two years ago, in an effort to reach more children, Gross
began to credential preschool and after-school teachers and daycare
providers to teach Project Joy. Now he and his small staff take teachers
on deluxe all-expenses paid retreats to introduce them to Project Joy
philosophy and, he says, to get them playing.
“Every teacher I talk to tells me the Project Joy retreat is the most
fun they have ever had in any training,” says Pamela Mottley. And this,
she adds, has helped change attitudes about play among teachers. “We’re
fighting deeply embedded ideas, here, that our role as educators is
to control children and keep them focused on academic tasks,” she says.
But with the training and support, more teachers are embracing the
power of play to engage—and transform—their students. “When you think
of all the lives these teachers touch over their careers, the potential
for change is enormous,” says Mottley.
