Play Schools for Parents

The idea was born in 1948, when Corinna Brocher, 4, innocently asked her daddy, Psychiatrist Tobias Brocher, "How did you learn to be a father?" Brocher, temporarily speechless, eventually gave his daughter a noncommittal answer. But he began to reflect on the astonishing fact that there was no professional training for what he considered "the most important profession" --parenthood.

Brocher set out to rectify the omission. His starting point was a provocative idea: "Give a serious and powerful man a child's toy and leave him alone with it. After a short while he experiences, painfully or happily, how his childhood was, and he begins to understand both himself and his children better." Brocher, now head of the sociopsychology department at Frankfurt's Sigmund Freud Institute, started his first "play school for parents" in Ulm, Germany, in 1955. Since that time, several additional Brocher-inspired schools have opened in Germany and other European countries, and the concept is now being tested at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas.

Revelations. In a parental play school, there are no lectures. Instead, nine or ten couples normally spend two evenings a week in such activities as finger painting, clay modeling and playing cat's cradle. During a third evening session, with a trained leader to guide them, they talk about what they did, felt and observed during their play. The results often come as startling revelations to the participants.

One of Brocher's student-parents was an overly correct, intellectual judge who talked down to other participants. During his first finger-painting session, the judge could unbend only to the extent of dipping his little finger in white paint and making twelve neat rows of dots on a piece of white paper. Three weeks later, Brocher "found the same man with paint up to his elbows. He was red-faced, sweating, biting his tongue, and appeared to be very happy as he painted red, yellow and brown colors all over the wall."

When the psychiatrist asked "Isn't it fun?" the judge replied with an embarrassed grin, "I must tell you something. I was never permitted as a child to play with mud; my mother punished me when I came home dirty. My wife and I got into a lot of fights about our son because I couldn't stand seeing him playing with mud. Now I know how it feels and I am happy we can give our son a different experience from the one I had."

Other sources of parental trouble emerge from the play sessions. Unconsciously copying her own angry parent, a mother will often show almost sadistic anger when her child is slow to get to bed. A father sometimes tries to get from his child what he missed from his own parents. He may expect a child to accomplish what he himself wanted to accomplish but could not. Or he may force a child into the role of a loved, feared or hated sibling of his own. One father, for example, finally realized that he was grumpy with his little daughter because he was afraid she would reject him --as his little sister had rejected him years before. In short, Brocher concludes, parents often need the chance that play therapy gives them to relive, and solve, their own repressed childhood conflicts. Only then, in many cases, can they allow their offspring to be children in their own right.

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