Читать книгу The Creative Arts in Counseling - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 47

Children, especially preschool-age and elementary-age children, seem to love music. They spontaneously sing, listen, or play instrument-like objects such as those found in rhythm bands. Children’s natural affinity for music relates to a number of factors, including the fact that they may not have the vocabulary to express certain feelings without borrowing from a song that conveys such emotions (DeLucia-Waack & Gerrity, 2001). Their natural affinity for music can be used by counselors to promote fun, learning, good feelings, and bonding among children from diverse backgrounds. Songs can be used to “introduce a topic, begin a discussion, lead an activity, channel energy, suggest potential thoughts/feeling/new behaviors, or end a session with positive affect” (DeLucia-Waack & Gerrity, 2001, p. 280). Music may also be used to help foster changes in children who are developmentally delayed (D. Aldridge et al., 1995), who have been abused (Ostertag, 2002), or who are dealing with their parents’ divorce (DeLucia-Waack & Gellman, 2007). In the last situation, music, as an intervention, is as effective as traditional psychoeducational methods in decreasing cognitive and social anxiety and many irrational beliefs.

Music is often a primary ingredient in teaching guidance lessons. One technique that works is using music to express feelings. For example, DeLucia-Waack (2001) wrote a hands-on manual for counselors that offered a creative way to help children of divorce learn new coping skills through music. Among the topics addressed were parental conflict and family relationships, anger management, divorce-related stress, custody issues, and court scenarios. Through music, children have been helped to understand and overcome the crisis of divorce and develop in healthy ways. In another guidance approach, Gerler (1982) recommended that a counselor and music teacher work together to devise a game in which children were “teamed in groups of four and instructed to create musical ways to express feelings” (p. 63) without words or lyrics. In the case of fourth graders who carried out this task, one feeling was assigned to each group, and they were directed to devise two or three musical ways to express this emotion. Responses ranged from forming a hum-and-sniffle quartet to represent sadness to using two pianos to convey an angry musical conversation.