Facilitated Free Play Analysis

The intervention program is called facilitated free play. The authors of the article are Yan Li, Robert J. Coplan, Yuemin Wang, Jingtong Yin, Jingjing Zhu, Zhuqing Gao and Linhui Li. The type of approach is client centered. The disorder areas include selective mutism because the participants exhibit extreme shyness. The program is designed for adolescents, however, the specific population for this study was 4-5 year-old Chinese boys and girls in the Shanghai public elementary school system. According to ASHA selective mutism is when a child does not speak in certain situations such as school and other social settings, but will speak at other time such as at home or to very close friends. The facilitated play program was designed to combat
selective mutism in young children. The study found that the children that participated in the program demonstrated significantly greater post-intervention frequencies of social interactions than before starting the intervention program. The results also show the children had greater prosocial interactions with children outside of the intervention setting, thus showing the intervention has real world implications to help selective mutism children. This intervention program incorporated client-centered facilitated free play.
The intervention consisted of the social skills training and facilitated play. The participants met for 1 hour sessions twice a week over a 7-week period. The format of the intervention groups consisted of a brief warm-up session of unstructured free play; self-presentation speeches; circle time; and leader-facilitated free play. The self-presentation speech session was intended to give the participants an opportunity to speak freely in a safe environment about a topic they were familiar with. The circle time sessions were used to provide didactic content. The group leader focused on a particular set of appropriate social skills each week, including initiating and maintaining peer interactions, understanding/expressing feelings and the regulation of negative affect, with a specific focus on fear/anxiety. Materials used for self-presentation included puppets, picture books, songs, and games which were all age-appropriate ways of conveying the content and practicing social and emotional skills. The leader-facilitated free play was designed to mirror free-play sessions at kindergarten. Participants were free to play with available peers and materials. The leader guided and facilitated social participation, as well as prompting, modeling, encouraging and reinforcing the specific social skills discussed during circle time. The session leader met recurrently with the principal to review videotapes of the group intervention sessions. During these meetings, the session leader was provided with detailed feedback to encourage their continued adherence to the treatment
protocol. Locating information was challenging, however, once I found an appropriate article locating procedures and materials within the article was easy. Benefits of this approach/program not only had success in the intervention clinical setting, but it had successful results in real world social settings. This is important because the purpose of interventions is to see real world results. Limitations of this approach/program are the small scale findings. The finding should be replicated and extended with larger samples, a wider range of outcome variables such as measures of anxiety, different sources such as teacher reports, and a follow-up period beyond 2 months. Research studies that support the effectiveness of this program include; Rappee and colleagues and Chronis- Tuscano.