Play therapy and race conflict in young children.

THERE seems to be a growing interest on the part of many people today to explore more fully and objectively the dynamics of group behavior in an attempt to determine better methods of meeting the issues that sometimes arise in the áreas of human relations. Certainly the race issue is one that provokes further investigation and study. And as one sees examples of individuáis becoming involved in race issues, with the scatter and spread and clash of the generated emotionalized attitudes that are often a part of this issue, many questions arise that might throw some additional light on this problem if they could be answered in such a manner that a constructive way of meeting the problems would be forthcoming. In this article there is a brief account of some experimental work done in group play therapy with six-, seven-, and eight-year-old children. The primary purpose of the study was to determine the effectiveness of play therapy for small groups of children who were having difBculty adjusting to other children. The children who were selected for participation in the group therapy experience were either extremely withdrawn or aggressively antisocial. There were four groups of children from four different classrooms —and four children in each group, two girls and two boys. The plan for the therapy was as follows. Each gróup would meet with the play therapist for one 40-minute period each week for ten meetings. At the conclusión of the tenth meeting the groupings would become transitory, mixed groupings. In other words, the eleventh meeting of the grouping would be composed of four children, one from each classroom represented in the study. The next four meetings would continué on this pattern so that each time there would be a group of children who had never been together in the play group before. The purpose of this procedure was to study the children's adjustability to new group experiences. A study of the data of this experiment revealed some interesting material on the problem of racial conflict among young children and the results of the group experience for these children. In this article only that material related to the race issue will be included. This material is presented here for consideration as a possible means of studying the dynamics of group behavior, and the generation and dissipation of the childrens' emotionalized attitudes. It is presented with these questions: Does this type of verbatim descriptive material seem to lend itself to a scientific study of the "race issue"? And does this therapeutic procedure seem to be an eííective way of resolving racial conflict among children ? These play contacts were not directed by the therapist. The children were in a free play situation where they could express any attitudes and feelings that they wished to express. In this type of experience we often see the child's real self in spontaneous expression. Consequently, it seems that such material might ofifer rich resources for a detailed study. These excerpts, lifted out of the complete context of the record of the childrens' play, are presented only as