Play Therapy
What Is Play Therapy?
Play therapy is a form of psychotherapy that utilizes play activities to help individuals, particularly children, explore and process their emotions, experiences, and thoughts. Therapeutic play helps children address and resolve their struggles, building on the natural way that they learn about themselves and their relationships in the world around them.
It is a highly effective, child-focused modality that addresses the child’s issue at their developmental level. The playroom and therapist provide a safe space for emotional expression, problem-solving, skill-building, building attachment, and healing.
Play therapy can help with emotional regulation, sensory processing or executive functioning issues, anxiety, or developmental delay, among other challenges. Certain experiences can impact children’s behavior or emotions, like going through a big change, a move, or losing a loved one, and play therapy can help them process these events.
Play therapy is especially helpful for toddlers, children, and teens with trauma, attachment issues, or difficulty verbalizing their thoughts and feelings. Play therapy promotes emotional resilience in the child, connection between the child and caregiver, and facilitates healing in ways that talk-only therapy cannot.
How Play Therapy Works
Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist known for his theory of cognitive development, discussed how play is essential for children to express their feelings. Children are not equipped with language from birth, so they don’t know how to share what they think or feel with words, but rather through actions like play.
Studies show that play therapy is highly effective in treating a variety of childhood disorders, including anxiety, depression, trauma-related disorders, and behavioral diagnoses. (1) Play therapy can improve social-emotional competencies as well as promote emotional resilience. (2)
Play therapy is a developmentally appropriate, natural approach that creates space for children to safely express and process difficult emotions and learn ways to cope with challenging experiences. Unlike other talk-only modalities, play therapy uses toys, imagination, movement, and body-based interventions, making it easier and more effective for kids.
How Play Therapy Works Within A Child’s Mind
Play therapy engages the whole brain and body of the child through the integration of sensory, motor, and emotional processing, yielding deeper, more effective healing. Play therapy strengthens attachment between the child and a safe adult through shared experience, restoring a sense of control for a child who has experienced trauma or anxiety by providing a container to practice choice, problem-solving, making decisions, and autonomy within.
This type of therapy can help children who struggle with a variety of issues. They can start to develop problem-solving skills like the resilience needed to handle difficult decisions. With their therapist, they can take part in role-play and imaginative scenarios that help them experience follow-through and retain the skills needed for situations that arise outside of therapy. Processing and desensitizing their experiences with trauma, while it may be difficult, can help them better understand what they’ve been through and increase their inner strength.
Additionally, through the act of play, children will have the chance to learn new skills and coping tools including:
Emotional regulation through learning mindfulness and distress tolerance.
Healthy coping strategies like deep breathing, journaling, therapeutic art, storytelling, and grounding techniques.
Improved communication in verbally expressing their thoughts and feelings
Social skills and confidence like learning and practicing appropriate social experiences, turn-taking, and conflict resolution.
Healthy peer and family relationships like boundary setting, executive functioning skill practice, and healthy interpersonal effectiveness.