What is Play Therapy?
Play-based therapy offers holistic approach to addressing emotional and behavioural issues in children. Play therapy integrates therapeutic techniques with the natural language to play to promote healing, growth and resilience.
It can provide a healthy way for your child to sort through and process their feelings in the playroom, be free to transform past experiences, and make sense of new ones.
Through re-experiencing and testing their world in the playroom, children are given the opportunity to form new neural connections (brain superhighways) within their little brains, increasing their sense of empowerment, emotional regulation, insight, and self-belief.
Play-based therapy is a highly effective therapeutic approach for addressing emotional and behavioural issues in children by utilising play to help children, express their feelings, thoughts, experiences, and behaviours.
The objectives of play therapy:
The goals of play therapy can vary depending on the individual child and their presenting issues. Some common objectives of play therapy include:
- Emotional Expression: Helping the child express and process difficult emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, or confusion.
- Problem-Solving: Encouraging the child to explore and develop new ways of coping with challenges or conflicts.
- Behavioural Change: Addressing behavioural issues by teaching alternative behaviours and improving self-control.
- Social Skills Development: Fostering positive social interactions, communication skills, empathy, and cooperation.
- Trauma Resolution: Assisting children in processing traumatic experiences and reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
Based on the belief that play is a natural medium for communication…
Particularly for children who may not have developed the verbal skills to express themselves effectively. In play therapy sessions, a trained therapist creates a safe and supportive environment where the child can freely engage in various types of play activities.
These activities may include drawing, painting, storytelling, puppetry, role-playing, sand tray play, and more, depending on the child’s preferences and needs. The therapist observes the child’s play and interacts with them in a non-directive manner. In non-directive play therapy, the child leads the play.
An empowering space for your child!
Children can often find it difficult to find words and reason to express their feelings, particularly when they are feeling scared, worried, or sad, and therefore seek different outlets such as play and behaviour to explore and share with us what is going on for them. We see the child’s behaviour as being a symptom of something deeper, and through the therapeutic process, children are fostered to achieve their potential for inner growth and healing to gain more of a sense of balance and control in their lives.
Play Therapy can be an amazing modality for children as it can support children of all ages to tap into their inner resources, and release, express and process their big feelings, in a way that works best for them. Part of our role is to provide gentle emotional scaffolding, where your child is free to go where they need to, safely and securely.
We work as emotional co-regulators in the playroom, which refers to the way we’re able to feel and sense your child’s internal state during the play session.
During our sessions, the playroom and play experience can offer a safe, predictable, and empowering space for your child. They will be supported to:
- Work on developing their emotional resilience and capacity.
- Form a greater sense of self-confidence and self-respect for themselves and others.
- Form the confidence to re-enact, recreate and play out some of their inner experiences in the playroom, creating new and positive brain neural pathways and connections.
- Help them form healthier ways to communicate and cope in the real world.
- Learn new social skills and relational skills with family.
- Develop new and creative solutions to problems.