Is Art Therapy best for kids?

Children and adolescents developmental stages cause a skew in how different therapy tactics are effective in reaching each individual. Art therapy is a method many art teachers and therapists have worked to collaborate on to develop a new form of therapeutic expression for adolescents. Art therapy holds many benefits and is much more widely applicable to adolescents than select forms of psychological therapy.

Art therapy is aimed at directing children’s reward pathways and allowing an alternate form of expression to help teach unique problem-solving. Using art to express an emotion or tell a story that, in some stages of development, children are limited in expressing or explaining verbally.

Fei-Ya Su’s students benefit from the “no wrong answers” approach to art therapy in the classroom.

One of the main goals she describes is one of the most common and ideal concepts that are seen through participating in art therapy. The overall goal of her therapy is to see students “come to class feeling that this was a safe place to explore their passions with no right or wrong answers or methodologies.”

Teenagers need to be reminded of this. They are highly self-critical and easily discouraged, and in many areas of their lives, they feel some external pressure to conform to their surroundings while growing up. But not in her classroom. In many ways, picking at a child’s brain causes  hyper-fixation on the problem at hand, emphasizing what is wrong and making the child feel criticized. Many teenagers are not ready for these tactics to be one of the first steps taken in receiving mental health treatment. In art therapy, the lines often get blurred on the therapeutic side, and many patients take it as an art education, which helps separate their mind from the direct problem and solve these issues subconsciously before having these revelations brought to their attention. In conducting an art therapy experiment with her students through studying art therapy, Fei-Ya Su discussed the outcome and reflection of her experiment.

If I could do this class all over again, the change that I would consider making the most is to have students create an art journal and update it every day at home. This would have given them more opportunity to think about trying different art materials and generate new ideas that they could record and refer to come class time.

Understanding a concept can sometimes be interpreted better from an alternate perspective. Participating in artistic expression, or a visual, carves out a new sensory implication in therapy practices rather than traditional verbal expression and adds a hands-on component that makes the patient feel as if they have more control over their situation, which has a heavy influence on their willingness to participate.

A research study, “A Systematic Narrative Review on Art Therapeutic Means and Forms of Expression, Therapist Behavior, and Supposed Mechanisms of Change,” was conducted by various researchers in an effort to prove how different applications of therapy impact qualifying adolescents.

AT interventions for children and adolescents are characterized by a variety of materials and techniques, forms of structure such as giving topics or assignments, and the use of language. Three forms of therapist behavior were seen: non-directive, directive, and eclectic. All three forms of therapist behavior, in combination with a variety of means and forms of expression, showed significant effects on psychosocial problems.

When applied in a flexible manner, art therapy is highly effective. In this experiment, the researchers studied the applicability of therapy to certain classifications of psychosocial behaviors the subjects were exhibiting; through this, they were able to determine how they can best execute these methods.

Art therapy is not just a direct practice; there is more to it than just the simplicity of having a person sit in front of a canvas. There is an entire curriculum behind the practices of art therapy; just like the psychosocial sciences behind cognitive and behavioral therapy, art therapy has a variety of approaches adapted to the individual patient.

Throughout the copious experiments revolving around art therapy, many researchers have questioned the legitimacy of its effectiveness. In the study that was conducted by Bosgraaf, Spreen, Pattiselanno, and Van Hooren, they were able to compare and contrast a variety of psychosocial therapy practices with art. 

The results showed that the use of means and forms of expression and therapist behavior is applied flexibly. This suggests the responsiveness of AT, in which means and forms of expression and therapist behavior are applied to respond to the client’s needs and circumstances, thereby giving positive results for psychosocial outcomes.

There are many benefits from art therapy and over time, it has been found much more applicable to adolescents than select forms of psychological therapy. While behavioral, or cognitive, therapy, which stems from conditioning through verbal communication, allows for many of one’s psychosocial issues to be addressed directly, art therapy can construct itself to present patients with more direct tasks as well. There is a more loosely based science behind the variability of techniques this practice uses, which allows for it to be more applicable to different psychosocial issues displayed in children and adolescents. Being able to interpret the practices of art therapy and how they contrast with more routine and traditional therapeutic practices allows us to begin to see the psychological depth behind art.

References

Bosgraaf L, Spreen M, Pattiselanno K, van Hooren S. Art Therapy for Psychosocial Problems in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Narrative Review on Art Therapeutic Means and Forms of Expression, Therapist Behavior, and Supposed Mechanisms of Change. Front Psychol. 2020 Oct 8 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33132993/

Su, Fei-Ya, “How Can Students Use Art to Learn Problem Solving?” (2020). Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/8136