Dibs In Search Of Self by Virginia M. Axline




* * * * Four stars out of Five

When finding a child who is shy and doesn’t like to do anything, this is the perfect book to take advice from. Dibs in Search of Self is written by an author whose main job is helping people. Axline’s Dibs in Search of Self in my opinion starts off sad and eventually has a happy ending. I liked that it starts off with a little boy Dibs who acts shy, but uses Play Therapy to find his way back. I would recommend this book to anybody who has or knows somebody with behavior problems.

Virginia M. Axline wrote another book called Play Therapy which is similar to Dibs in Search of Self except that it talks about how to use play therapy for children who have problems with emotions and behavior. She was more of a psychologist, because she only wrote two books not receiving any awards for her novels. Virginia started to do play therapy in the 1940s when a person-centred approach was made by another psychologist named Carl Rogers. Today, her work is based on play therapy practices largely, it’s always good to remember people from the past. Virginia wrote two books to talk about how play therapy works, and one of the patient’s that Virginia had.
Dibs in Search of Self is a nonfiction book about a little boy named Dibs who’s independent in the beginning until a lady named Ms. Jane (Axline) helps him out. When it’s time to play, Dibs is just sitting down doing nothing, and when it’s time to go, he wants to stay. Dibs has to play in a room by himself with Ms. Jane for a while until he becomes happy. She has a conversation with his mom about his behavior and finds her to be acting the same way as her son. What’s hard to believe is that despite the fact that he doesn’t talk a lot, he comes from a rich family.
In this book the main characters are Dibs, Ms. Jane, his mom, dad, and his sister Dorothy. Dibs’s mom claims that when he was born, her opportunity to be a doctor was thrown away, she claims she was doing great with this job. Dorothy and Dibs don’t get along well in the beginning, for example, Dibs gets angry when she comes into his room. Because of this, it is revealed that they don’t spend a lot of time together seeing each other every once in a while. Ms. Jane is a psychologist that watches Dibs during play therapy to make sure there is progress; she believes that his mom acts just like him. At the beginning, she has doubts that Dibs will improve on his behavior, but doesn’t let anything get in her way.
I like that this book gives some good information about how you should use play therapy. I like to read books about people who start off with negative personalities that end up becoming positive with the help of other characters. Without the fact that the play therapy worked out for Dibs, I probably would have hated this book. I don’t like that he only had one hour to play, if anything he should have had at least two hours. There aren’t really anymore things to discus, I liked just about everything else in this book. This is the only book that I read that I actually liked; I should start reading more often.
So that’s just about all the important details about Dibs in Search of Self; it was a good book about how to find your way back by letting people help you out. If it really is this easy, then all shy little kids out there should take a chance and try play therapy, it’s what every child deserves if they are shy. Dibs grew up to become smarter, understand his family more, and saw Ms. Jane a few times as he was going around the neighborhood. I would want to read this over and over again, because it inspires you to never lose hope. You only have one life, you deserve to live it the right way, happily from the beginning to end. The longer you wait, the longer it will take for your children to improve on behavior and talking more.