Play Therapy
Children often do not have the ability to completely vocalize their internal struggles. Play Therapy can help children express their emotions, deal with anxiety or trauma, learn new coping skills, and redirect inappropriate behavior. By using fun items like sandtrays, miniatures, puppets, animals, and baby dolls we can help your child understand what is going on in their world and how to work through it in a healthy way.
Play therapy is a therapeutic approach that uses play as a meaningful and effective intervention for children to express their thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a safe and supportive environment. Through a wide range of carefully selected activities, such as role-playing, storytelling, and various forms of art, children can communicate their emotions and challenges in a way that feels natural and comfortable for them. This modality not only helps therapists understand the child's unique perspective but also plays a crucial role in facilitating healing and personal growth. By engaging in play, children can explore difficult topics, develop essential coping skills, and foster emotional resilience, making it an invaluable tool in addressing both behavioral and emotional issues that they may be facing.
Play therapy offers numerous benefits for children who are facing emotional or psychological challenges of various kinds. It provides a safe and supportive environment where they can freely express their feelings and thoughts through play, which is their natural and instinctive form of communication. This therapeutic approach assists children in processing traumatic events they may have encountered, developing essential coping skills, and enhancing their overall emotional intelligence. Through playful and engaging interactions, therapists are able to observe and understand a child's behavior and emotions with much greater accuracy, allowing for tailored and effective interventions. Additionally, play therapy fosters self-esteem and resilience in children, empowering them to navigate their experiences more effectively while promoting overall mental well-being and personal growth.
Kids have so much fun, they don’t even know it’s therapy.
Each session is tailored to your child’s interests. If they are artistic, we can use paint, crayons, markers, or clay to explore their thoughts and feelings.
If they need lots of physical input or movement then we can play games, use kinetic sand, or fidgets to meet their needs.
Is your kid shy? Sandtray is a powerful way for kids to be able to show what is going on in their inner world without having to use any words.
There is something for every kid in the play room!
What parents can expect
As a parent myself, I understand how challenging and worrisome it is to be responsible for raising kids. There is no anxiety like parent-anxiety! Is my kid safe? Am I doing this right? Does my kid have the skills they need to be a successful adult one day? That’s where we can help!
Play Therapy Process:
Contact us to let us know you are interested in play therapy for your child.
We will call you to get some background information and schedule our intake session.
Our first meeting will be an Intake session on Zoom with parents only. This allows us to talk freely about what you are seeing your child struggle with, what you have tried, and what we can do to help your family.
We will set weekly recurring sessions for your child to come see us and work on the skills they need.
We will schedule Parent Consults every 6 - 8 weeks to check in and see how your child is progressing at home, school, and the playroom.
Play therapy can take between 10 to 15 sessions before you start to see a change in your child. It takes several sessions to build trust and a therapeutic relationship between the therapist and child. Then it takes even more time for the child to open up and be willing to work on their struggles. Of course this changes based on each child’s personality and what they are struggling with, but this is a general guideline. For this reason, I begin all play therapy relationships on a recurring weekly schedule. Your child and I need time to get to know each other, build our therapeutic relationship, and start the process of healing and change.
Parents are an incredibly important part of our play therapy sessions! Change and growth cannot occur if parents are not informed and on-board. We like to work with your child for about 2 months then have a parent consult with you. During these consults, we will let you know where we are in the process - if your child has started opening up and if they have shared any struggles with us. We will also give you ideas of strategies to try at home to help your child continue to make progress towards their goals.
If you think play therapy would be beneficial for your kid, reach out today to start the process!
Please notice that my hours are from 8 - 3 every day. I understand this means your child might miss school to come work on their emotion regulation skills. I am able to provide you with a school excuse note so their time away is considered excused (like a doctor’s visit). You can talk to your child’s teacher to see what might be the best time of day for them to miss a little school.