Oh, a puppet. Isn't that cute.
or
Isn't that a sweet puppet.
or
He has so much personality!
or
That really creeps me out!
or
Here! Here! Let me try!

Do any of these sound familiar? In fact, there are as many ways to experience and play with puppets as there are puppeteers. (and all of us are potential puppeteers....) Here at Purciful's, we break down puppet play into 4 main categories:

Puppet Play for Children
Puppet Play for Adults
Puppet Play for Therapy (regardless of puppeteer's age)
Puppet Play as Theater (regardless of puppeteer's age)

In brief, Puppet Play for Children is mostly about IMAGINATION. If you want to help broaden your child's imaginative world, puppets are perfect. As soon as a hand puppets or finger puppet slips on, your child has a NEW CHARACTER which pretty much demands a new world be invented to explain it! Stories and situations and conditions and memories and futures and meetings and incidents flow like water -- and the flow picks up with experience! The more a child plays with puppets, the more stories you begin to hear them tell.

As parents, grandparents, or friends -- you can become characters in this new world of experiences too! You can relate to the puppets (or not -- be aware that some children limit their creative world to just themselves and their new friends... and this is just fine. You might occasionally ask how Mr. Tweed or Miss Turtle is doing lately... for these children....)

At a deeper level, puppet play gives children a chance to try on new and different personality traits -- and to pretend. Pretend is soooo important! It's a very safe way to see what it's like to be somebody else. And since we all know that learning to see from other points of view is essential for a healthy adult life -- PRETEND is one of the best gifts we can give our kids!

Once a puppeteer is grown up (or at least tall) Puppet Play for Adults kicks in. What? You say, "Adults don't play with puppets!" Well, we say, "Wrong-o, MaryLou!" If your adults aren't playing with puppets, they probably should be. Especially if they missed Puppet Play for Children as described above! With adults, however, puppet play is not so much about imagination as it is about FREEDOM. Especially, freedom from self-judgement and self-censoring. We all have seen movies or heard stories about ventriloquists who perform with a "dummy" that has more personality than the puppeteer... Or about shy puppeteers who perform with puppets who are outgoing and even flirtatious or aggressive.

It is that kind of freedom which adults derive from puppets. Granted, some scary and long-supressed extroversion may pop out -- but it probably needed a way out to begin with! The whole long history of "Punch and Judy" seems to be dotted with broken and battered peasant puppeteers whose only outlet was to have their poor puppets beat and murder each other... In those of us who haven't been beaten by armies of land-grabbing tyrants, or crop-stealing tribes of marauders, the murderous and screeching Punch and Judy Show is probably more freedom than we need. Freedom for most grown ups means puppets can become playful jokesters in the hands of the timid, fast-talking party boys and girls in the hands of homebodies, and raucous drunks in the hands of tea-tottlers. Extroverts get to show off their thoughtful "wisdom of the ages", penny-pinchers get to become benefactors, and even the physically handicapped suddenly have access to an alter ego with fewer or no limitations at all!

In the hands of an adult, a puppet is like wearing a mask at a party -- you can say and do things you might not ever attempt to say out loud or do in public -- it is an instant pressure valve that gives even the most stressed among us a way to say what has been pushed down and hidden.

Puppets for Play Therapy are great for children's therapists for exactly the reasons we've talked about above and many more. Whereas dolls give therapists opportunities to see relationships through the eyes of children -- puppets give therapists the chance to hear the world through a child's experiences. It's not as simple as --"what the puppet says is what the child is thinking." In fact, it can be so much more complicated that -- well -- that children's therapists go to school for years and years just to find out where to watch for clues!

In other words, Don't Try This At Home. Go visit a professional.

Puppet Play as Theater is the most familiar and accessible use of puppets, and what most of us think of when puppets are mentioned. Muppets. Sesame Street. "The Little Goatheard" play in the movie The Sound of Music. Yoda is a puppet. Gumby and Pokey were a kind of puppet. Electronically, CGI characters like Golum and Dobby the House Elf are theoretically puppets-- Golum perhaps more because a human actually inhabited him. Part-puppets/part humans like Jaba the Hut and Big Bird qualify -- though the line begins to blur in some of the last puppets listed, because they are possibly as much or more actors acting as puppets acting. Modern technology has rendered puppetry a very fuzzy territory.