We use medical play to help teach children about what they\u2019re going to experience in the hospital and the things they\u2019re going to see and perhaps come into contact with. So there\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Medical play is so important with children. It helps reduce their level of anxiety, their fears, the unknown. A child\u2019s 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\u2019re going to experience, the people that they\u2019re going to see, the smells they might smell, what they\u2019re going to experience as a patient, what they\u2019re going to wear, where they\u2019re 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\u2019s all new to them as well, they may not have had experience in the hospital as a child, and so here\u2019s their little one going, so their anxiety comes down amazingly, so, and we know children feed off of anything their parent is feeling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we invite children to engage in medical play, in health care play, we\u2019re inviting them to share their experience. We\u2019re asking questions, they\u2019re asking questions; it\u2019s a two-way conversation. In that supportive dialogue relationship we\u2019re able to validate a child\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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, \u201cYou did a great job!\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019re going to normalize this preparation by using an approach that we as child educators are familiar with and we know it works. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We use medical play to help teach children about what they\u2019re going to experience in the hospital and the things they\u2019re going to see and perhaps come into contact with. So there\u2019s a wide range of medical equipment, band-aids, syringes, puppets and dolls, and we use whatever we think the child is going to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1834","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1835,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1834\/revisions\/1835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}