Determining the Effectiveness of Game Therapy on Children's Aggression, Stress and Anxiety

Childhood is one of the most important stages of life in which the personality is founded and formed. Most post-childhood abnormalities and behavioral abnormalities result from a lack of attention to the childhood critical age and inadequate guidance in the developmental process. This neglect leads to noncompliance and adaptation to the environment and the occurrence of various deviations in different dimensions for the child. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of therapeutic play on children's aggression, stress and anxiety. In a semi-experimental design with an unequal control group with pre-test and post-test, 40 male students of the fourth grade elementary school of Noorabad (Delfan) in the academic year 1397-1396 were selected using available non-specific sampling method. They were divided into two groups: experimental (20 people) and control (20 people). At first, aggression, stress and anxiety were pre-tested. The training of therapeutic games from the book Gary Landers (1369, translation of Khadijah Arian, 1369) was presented to the experimental group for 8 sessions of 1 hour 45 minutes and weekly two sessions. Then the two groups were again tested for aggression, stress and anxiety. The results of multivariate coovarance analysis indicated that therapeutic games are effective on children's aggression, stress and anxiety. It can be concluded that play therapy therapy has an effective effect on decreasing aggression, stress and anxiety in children and should be considered.