For a child talking therapy without play can be so very confronting. It is also boring and not at all fun. So what did I learn from building a tower?
What I learnt was there is a place for good people and one for baddies. The good people have the best tower. Why is it the best, well apart from all the good people living there, it has the favourite coloured blocks, it is high (which is very important) and constructed with a lot of thought.
The not so favourite blocks are used for the ‘other tower’, which is not very high at all! That’s because the mean people live there and well, they don’t deserve the favourite blocks. What makes someone mean? “Putting me in time out of course”. Who else lives there….. the other people who are mean……
From a tower of Lego blocks I learnt who are the good people, as they live in the “good tower”. We label them as the ‘safe people’. What makes someone safe? Who are your safe people?
Some of the mean people have done some awful things, so we leave them in the tower. Some of them get to leave, as they weren't mean. The person who decided to call time out isn't always mean …. and so they are allowed to join the good people, in the good tower!
So what's it like to be in time out? How do you get there? Apparently, fighting with your sibling will put you there every time, as will drawing on walls with textas!
The way the tower is constructed also tells me a lot. Are they fussy, particular, can they keep focus .... Do these traits overlap into other areas of their life or is this behaviour confined to building towers?
I also learn how they deal with disappointment, building towers is not always so straightforward, right? They sometimes fall, we run out of materials and we need to make adjustments to get it right.
You certainly can learn so much from building a tower!