Page 34 - Meeting with Children Book

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of ideas. Sometimes the characters chosen are literal-
like representations such as using mother, father and
child figures and miniature house settings, and other
times the child will use objects, non-human characters
or animals to tell her/his story. Children’s use of
symbols and metaphors tend to be either quite close
to their literal experiences or quite distant. The
literalness is related to using language to identify “this
is me and this is my dad” while the more distant
metaphors utilize either third person references or
stories of “the bear and the fox” for example. Both
ways of communicating may tell a similar story about
the relational world of the child but the non-literal
form of expression will require the person meeting
with the child to use particular non-anchoring
questions (see section on questions P177) to
understand more about what the child is expressing
or if the child does not have the language or decides
not to share answers with you, hypotheses must be
formed.

Metaphor
What is a metaphor? Metaphor is an object or a
number of objects, an activity or an idea that is used
as a symbol of something else. If a child chooses a
number of symbols (which are considered single units
of meaning) such as a puppy, a miniature bed and a
wizard, arranges them together and says “The puppy
cannot sleep and he cries too much. He has to go to
the wizard for help” a metaphor has emerged. What
does it mean? If you stay in the metaphor in your
exploration, you will discover more. For instance, if
you ask the child, “What does the wizard say to the