Effectiveness of child-centered play therapy on resiliency of Children with leukemia cancer

Children with cancer undergo many hard and long procedures and treatments, which can lead to many destructive effects on their mental health. Since resiliency is an important factor in reducing the intensity of negative emotions interests researchers. On the other hand, Play is known as the language of children's feelings. So this study was designed to evaluate the effects of that child-centered play therapy on the resiliency of Children with leukemia cancer.

This study was conducted in 2019 and the research method was a quasi-experimental study with random assignment of subjects in the experimental and control groups with pre-test and post-test. The statistical population of this study was children aged 8-12 years with leukemia cancer in Ali-Asghar (AS) Children’s Hospital. Through available sampling, 30 children were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. The intervention of this study included 12 sessions on the experimental group and each session was performed individually for 45 minutes of child-centered play therapy. Social-Emotional Assets and Resilience Scale (SEARS) (Merrill, 2008) was used to measure the resiliency of the children with cancer.

The results of this study showed that there is a significant difference between the resiliency scores in the pre-test (098/2) and post-test (882/2) in the experimental group with an intensity of (/0848). However, this difference was not observed in the control group.

Child-centered play therapy has an effect on increasing the resiliency of children with leukemia cancer and can be used to increase the resiliency of hospitalized children.