Favreau and Kidder - medical play

We use medical play to help teach children about what they’re going to experience in the hospital and the things they’re going to see and perhaps come into contact with. So there’s a wide range of medical equipment, band-aids, syringes, puppets and dolls, and we use whatever we think the child is going to be exposed to we will use.  

Medical play is so important with children. It helps reduce their level of anxiety, their fears, the unknown. A child’s imagination can go from zero to a million, and so when we actually show them the real things about what really going to happen and what they’re going to experience, the people that they’re going to see, the smells they might smell, what they’re going to experience as a patient, what they’re going to wear, where they’re going to be staying, their anxiety level comes down so much, and their parents as well, because if parents are nervous about what is going to happen, and sometimes it’s all new to them as well, they may not have had experience in the hospital as a child, and so here’s their little one going, so their anxiety comes down amazingly, so, and we know children feed off of anything their parent is feeling. 

When we invite children to engage in medical play, in health care play, we’re inviting them to share their experience. We’re asking questions, they’re asking questions; it’s a two-way conversation. In that supportive dialogue relationship we’re able to validate a child’s experience. In that time a child might say I had an i.v. in my foot, and then I had an i.v. in my head, and then I had an i.v. in my arm and it hurt! You’ve had a lot of needles, I appreciate that. Sounds like those needles hurt you, and go on from there. What kinds of tools did you use to help you when those experiences were happening? The interaction during medical play invites opportunities for dialogue and for children to be heard, for their experience to be validated. For us to say, “You did a great job!” For them to hear that, you did a great job. For them to experience some sense of mastery. To walk out of here feeling they entered a challenging experience, they learned about it, they applied a coping strategy, and by golly, they managed.  

The whole idea here is children are important. Children need to participate. They are not just coming in to have something being done to them; they need to be active participants. We invite them in to the play because play is their world so we’re going to normalize this preparation by using an approach that we as child educators are familiar with and we know it works.