Helen (and others in the ADHD thread), I have been a playworker since the late 1960s, mostly on adventure playgrounds in the UK. In the last fifteen years my direct work with children has tended to be more specialist. Over the years many children have come to me with labels, increasingly of late ADHD. I have never yet found a child labelled in that way who was unable to relate to me constructively and attentively through their play. In a short series of experiments, I asked principal carers, who had expressed major concerns about their relationships with their children, to engage with them in imaginal play. Every one reported considerable and sustained improvements both in their relationships with the child and in the child's relationships with others.
My observations of children with their principal carers (overwhelmingly their mothers) appear to indicate that most apparently anti-social behaviours exhibited by the children are best explained as "dysplay", distorted play cues arising from increasingly desperate attempts on the part of the child to get playful interaction with the carer. A short period of accurate response to play cues appears to diminish this "dysplay" dramatically and in a sustained fashion.
The major problem I have had in gaining acceptance of this technique, would appear to be its lack of seriousness. Engaging with a child in imaginal play looks silly and adult participants often say that it feels silly at first. One mother of a four year old who had set fire to his nursery school and his house said that it felt she was ignoring the problem when she just played cars (with noises) while lying on the carpet with him. However, she also said that the end of that session, when he spontaneously cuddled her, was the first time that had happened since he had been a baby.
If I had made the option of medication for the child available to that mother at the outset, I am sure that she would have taken it. She would have felt she was addressing a serious problem seriously.
Stephen Rennie, Leeds Metropolitan University
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