Slime? Therapeutic?!
Slime – yes, slime! Something most parents associate with mess and chaos! – can play a crucial role in therapy, particularly for children. In this blog, we will explore the therapeutic benefits of slime and how this seemingly simple activity serves as an effective tool for emotional regulation, sensory engagement, and overall mental health.
Why is making slime therapeutic?
Before we discuss the benefits of making slime, let’s understand play. Play therapy allows children to communicate in ways that make sense to them. It gives them a medium to express complex emotions and manage sensory stimuli through engaging, hands-on activities.
Play as a Gateway to Emotional Regulation
Prior to becoming trained in play therapy, I related to children in the way most adults do. I would counsel using reason, logic, and conversation. It didn’t take long until I felt like I was missing something. Most would squirm in their seats, fidget, look away, or quickly become disengaged. At the time, I saw their behavior as avoidance. It often felt like I was talking at walls or lecturing rather than having a reciprocal conversation. I wondered how I could reach them in a way that engaged them while allowing for change.
Kids had big problems and I felt the pressure to be helpful. But what if my notion of helpfulness for children looked different than traditional behavioral therapy?
A mentor of mine had spent his career working with children who experienced neglect and abuse. He encouraged me to consider play therapy. “Play therapy” sounded so trivial, but I trusted his recommendation. He noted that children need an outlet that makes sense to them, otherwise change could be not only difficult but inaccessible.
After taking a number of play therapy courses, I started incorporating play into therapy sessions. We’d talk for a few minutes, and then I’d say the words coined by the father of play therapy, Gary Landreth: “You can use all of these toys in most of the ways you would like” (Landreth, 2002). Pretty soon I saw change in a new way. Through play, children can express themselves in a safe and controlled environment. They practice problem-solving skills, build empathy, and improve self-regulation. Sessions stopped feeling less like an interrogation and more like a collaborative process.
The work of play therapy practitioner and researcher, Charles Schaeffer, identified the “Therapeutic Powers of Play”.
Schaeffer, and his colleague, Athena Drewes, posited that play is inherently therapeutic (Schaeffer & Drewes, 2014). Play allows children, and adults for that matter, to practice communication skills, approach emotions and learn to respond to them, build a sense of empathy and relationship, and assist in the development of problem solving, self-esteem, and emotion regulation. What’s more, play allows humans to approach challenges from a distance that feels safe.
Think of a child who feels powerless. Through play, they can pretend to be the most powerful superhero on earth, the general of an army, or the queen of a kingdom. And suddenly, they tune into a sense of empowerment that they haven’t experienced before. That felt sense of empowerment doesn’t stop in the playroom. It stays with them as they return to the places that they may have felt disempowered. Now, rather than seeing themselves as powerless, they can approach their challenges with the inherent awareness that they are capable.
As we know from cognitive behavioral therapy, a thoroughly researched behavioral therapy built for adolescents and adults, “action precedes emotion” (Behavioral Activation for Depression, n.d.). In other words, we can talk about how terrible we feel until we’re blue. It’s when we begin doing something that we start to feel better. Play provides an avenue for movement. You’ve likely seen this if you’ve watched a child play. A frustrated, scared, or bored child shifts their emotional state with more ease when they play rather than when they are lectured or told how to feel.
Something to consider amidst all this talk of playing is that play isn’t just puppets and dress up. According to Scholarpedia (Gray, n.d.), play can be boiled down into 5 general categories. Play is:
- Self chosen and self led
- Intrinsically motivated (the process is more important than the product)
- Follows no rules other than those imposed by the player
- Imaginative
- An active and alert process that is generally free of stress*
*To be clear, play can be stress filled. The difference between “stress” and “play based stress” is that play allows us to approach real life stressors at a distance. We can pretend to be late to school when we’re playing. We can even elicit similar physiological sensations. But outside the moment of actual stress, we have one foot in fantasy and one in reality, allowing ourselves room to think more creatively than we do under moments of immediate pressure.
The Benefits of Slime Play
Slime is an accessible tool that offers numerous benefits for children in therapy. Here are just a few:
- Stress Relief: Slime provides a break from daily stressors, allowing children to focus on the present moment through play.
- Self-Regulation Skills: As children manipulate slime, they practice emotional control, particularly in moments of frustration or overstimulation.
- Problem-Solving: The unpredictability of slime-making teaches children to cope with frustration and adapt their strategies when things don’t go as planned.
- Mindfulness Practice: Slime helps children slow down and focus on sensory details, making it a valuable tool for those needing support with attention span and mindfulness.
Slime engages multiple senses: touch, sight, and even sound. Whether it’s gooey, crunchy, or smooth, slime provides a sensory experience that helps children with sensory sensitivities or those needing to release pent-up energy. The hands-on nature of slime-making encourages focus and serves as a mindfulness activity—a grounding tool that can lower stress levels and aid in emotional regulation.
Types of Slime and Their Impact
Therapy sessions may include different types of slime to engage children in varied ways. Butter slimes, cloud slime, and even magnetic slime each offer a unique tactile experience. For instance, the smooth, stretchy feel of butter slime or the crunchy texture of slime with beads can be calming for children with high sensitivity to touch.
Beyond tactile engagement, slime-making fosters resilience. Kids learn through trial and error—slime sometimes fails to come together as expected, but the process of trying again builds perseverance. Additionally, adding elements like vibrant colors or food coloring makes the activity even more engaging for children, introducing them to concepts like color psychology in a playful way.
Making Time for Slime
Knowing what we now do about play, its breadth, and its importance, let’s talk about slime.
Making slime is messy, smelly, unpredictable, and even frustrating. It generally takes multiple attempts before it becomes “just right”. Sometimes, it doesn’t ever turn out as hoped for, despite the most valiant of efforts. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Slime isn’t just slime. Making slime is about making mistakes, dealing with frustration, learning from mistakes, and exercising determination…even when you’re annoyed and covered in glue and glitter. It’s also about engaging your senses and tolerating discomfort (I’ve never met a kid who’s made slime without expressing disgust at some point in the process).
It’s worth noting that it never ceases to amaze me the kids who choose to make slime. It’s often the kids who are the most selective eaters, who cry and scream if their sock doesn’t feel right, or the kids who appear hyper-reactive to the world around them. Slime is a kid friendly medicine that allows them to titrate their exposure to discomfort. With practice, they go from confused, frustrated, and disgusted, to proud of their efforts.
And to be clear, their final product is less important than the process of creation. Kids often leave therapy with goopy, messy, concoctions they proudly call slime. To adult eyes, these creations are baffling. But to kid eyes, just imagine the message: “This is something I made, all by myself!” “This is evidence that I am capable, creative, and resourceful.”
So next time your child goes to therapy and returns home with a bag of unidentifiable goop, remember this: to your child, that goop represents something important enough that they want to hold on to. Is it a sense of esteem? An emerging confidence in their ability to tolerate discomfort? A need for more sensory engaging activities?
Whatever the slime represents, remember that its meaning is far more important than the item itself.
Blog written by Sentier therapist Lily Ferreira, MSW, LICSW, RPT.
References
Behavioral Activation for Depression. (n.d.). Behavioral Activation for Depression. Retrieved September 27, 2024, from https://medicine.umich.edu/sites/default/files/content/downloads/Behavioral-Activation-for-Depression.pdf
Gray, P. (n.d.). Definitions of Play. Scholarpedia. Retrieved September 27, 2024, from http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Definitions_of_Play
Landreth, G. (2002). In Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship. Brunner-Routledge.
Schaefer, C. E., & Drewes, A. A. (Eds.), (2014). The therapeutic powers of play: 20 core agents of change (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
