Apr 6, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

As wonderful as music can be for a lot of people, children sometimes develop an early aversion.

“I was one of those kids who, at age 5, was forced to go to the basement and practice the piano for half an hour every day, whether I liked it or not,” Katie Harrill recalled. “You play scales that are meaningless. Who wants to play up and down? It’s not productive.”

She stayed sufficiently interested and had the talent to earn a degree in piano performance and embark on a career as creative arts program supervisor for the regional nonprofit support organization Wesley Family Services.

Not all youngsters are like that, of course, and the creative arts program offers music therapy to help get them engaged in an art form that can serve them well the rest of their lives.

“We strive for them to want to come to music,” Harrill explained. “And maybe they don’t even know they’re learning, but they are.”

Music therapy, conducted at three Wesley locations – South Fayette, Penn Hills and Marshall Township – actually is available for people of all ages, with some participants as old as 75.

“The primary diagnosis that we work with is autism,” Harrill said, in advance of the start of April as World Autism Month. “However, we do have other developmental diagnoses, and we also serve children who do not have diagnoses.”

Because the goal of music therapy is to help accomplish individualized goals – those might include communication, social, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, academic or physical skills – the approach to each therapy session is tailored to the individual.

“We take the children and see how they come in that day, and we kind of go with that,” Wesley music therapist Arianna Bendlin explained. “Sometimes we have a plan and we have to toss it out the window, and that’s totally fine for us.

“They might come in super-energetic, and we’re not going to immediately force them to sit down and be quiet,” she said. “We’re going to meet them at that energy with instruments or whatever we think is necessary and slowly, with each activity, bring them back to baseline.”

Wesley’s therapists, Harrill stressed, are credentialed professionals.

“I’m sure you’ve heard about an 11-year-old being a music therapist. That’s not reality,” she said. “We actually go to school, complete an internship, take an exam and be recertified every five years. So it is a rigorous program that we do complete.”

Musical therapy can serve a complementary role to parent-child interaction therapy, intervention for young children with disruptive behaviors such as tantrums, hitting or kicking, or difficulty listening or playing with others.

“Even if kids don’t have a ton of disruptive behaviors, it’s also really beneficial for some other mental health concerns: anxiety, selective mutism, autism, things like that,” Megan Hoffman, clinical manager of Wesley’s parent-child interaction therapy, explained.

The approach has two primary components, child-directed interaction and parent-directed interaction, with the former coming first in the process. Sessions occur in a specially designed playroom, where the child and caregiver participate together.

“This is where we really focus on teaching the parents play therapy skills so that we can help the relationship between parent and child,” Hoffman said. “Once we get them really to master those skills and be really great play therapists, then we’re going to behavior management. We’re going to first teach parents how to set up expectations, how to give really effective commands, and then we teach them a really effective discipline program. It goes stage by stage.”

Wesley offers parent-child interaction therapy at several sites, including its South Fayette location – 100 Emerson Lane, Suite 1525 – and South Hills Interfaith Movement, 5301 Park Avenue, Bethel Park.

For more information, visit Wesley Family Services at wfspa.org.