Dialectical Reflections on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Tele-Play Therapy

Abstract

ABSTRACT It’s been just over 2 years now since the spread of the COVID-19 virus began in the United States, a time period extensive enough to already be an inflection point in our history, yet recent enough to make it extremely difficult to speak to its impact psychologically – both now and going forward. This is especially true for young children, whose lives are always so influenced by developmental changes over time, that to believe we can fully grasp the consequences for their subsequent growth post-COVID is presumptuous at best, if not downright foolhardy. In this paper, we therefore have a far more modest aim: We’d like to reflect on what it has been like phenomenologically for beginning child therapists to see their very first cases remotely. This paper will therefore review the dialectical aspects of advantages and disadvantages to remote work and provide glimpses into several of these early treatments that depict these plusses and minuses. Because we find fault with the pejorative aspects of the term “remote,” we offer the term “tele-play therapy” as an alternative.