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It is not uncommon for psychotherapists to feel uneasy about their clinical work with children of poverty. They comment about how they do not feel that they are “really” getting anywhere with the treatments, or that “all they are doing is playing.” They are responding to the assumption that is made in clinical training that therapeutic play should be symbolic, and that the role of the child psychotherapist is to interpret this symbolic play: to make what is unconscious, conscious.
These comments challenge some of the usual assumptions about the nature of play. The nature of play can and does change on the basis of the environmental circumstances from which children come. Those children who come from chaotic backgrounds, because of the environmental deprivations that often accompany poverty and/or traumatic family situations, may play in ways that are different from children who come from more stable and/or less deprived circumstances. Theirs is, nonetheless, play. To determine the nature of a child's play requires an understanding of that child's actual daily life. Clinicians are prone to apply traditional standards for play, without regard to the influence of environmental circumstances on that child's development and, therefore, the nature of the child's play. Perhaps this stems from inadequate theory; perhaps it stems from inadequate experience; it may also stem from a form of ethnocentrism, for the children of poverty and the clinicians who treat them most often come from very different cultures.
To sketch out a hypothetical scenario of the world from which the children come: the adults are often inconstant in terms of when they are present, how they take care of and how