How Play Therapy Works

Children, like all of us, need to feel powerful and in control of their world.

• Play serves as children’s primary language and helps them organize their experience
• Play therapy takes bits of unimaginable reality into manageable situations and provides children with an opportunity to cope, make meaning, and feel powerful again.
• Through play, children have a chance to be in control and therefore increase their experience of security
• Play is healthy for children’s emotional development and helps them learn to understand and therefore effectively express big emotions.
• Adults can foster autonomy of the child by not answering their dilemmas but providing sufficient freedom and exploration so that the child has an opportunity to assume responsibility for their choices.
• My role as a play therapist is to understand and accept your child’s world and to provide opportunities to move through life’s challenges.