Play Therapist Explains: The Benefits of Play Therapy

You want what is best for your child. It is hard to watch them struggle with big feelings, worries, or behavior that is hard to manage.

Seeking out therapy can feel overwhelming too. It’s hard to know what kind of help your child needs.

What Is Play Therapy?

Play therapy is a modality used by therapists who work with children. While there are Registered Play Therapists (RPT), many mental health professionals can provide play therapy to children and families.

This type of therapy uses a child’s natural way to express and explore, play, to help process feelings or experiences. The therapist uses reflective observations and unconditional positive regard to support the child during a play therapy session.

Therapists can use books, puppets, dolls, a sand box with toys to go inside, art, and storytelling in play therapy. Themes that keep occurring, statements toys say, or types of books a child gravitates towards are all messages the child is sharing about how they are doing and what they need help with.

How Play Therapy Helps

Using play therapy with children has benefits for the child in therapy and for the family supporting this child. Having a natural way for a child to express and explore their feelings and experiences allows a child to work through these issues and gain a better understanding of their world.

It allows parents to be more attuned to their child during play and difficult situations, to help increase the cooperation and connection at home.

Since play is a natural experience for children, they are able to participate in it more easily than traditional “talk therapy” which can be used for adults and teenagers.

Play therapy can be used to treat a variety of issues in children. Behaviors that stem from insecure attachment with caregivers can be addressed through play therapy where the caregiver is present in the therapy sessions.

Traumatic experiences can be processed through nonverbal play, imaginary storytelling, art, or books. Even issues with family relationships (such as between siblings or a caregiver) can be treated with play therapy, through letter writing, sandbox work or imaginary storytelling.

Examples of Play Therapy

What I use in play therapy with clients:

Board games

How it can be therapeutic: Observing a child’s tolerance for losing, changes in status in a game, or how important it is for the child to win give insight to a therapist about how their game play dynamics with siblings or peers are, and how they deal with disappointment.

These play sessions can be an opportunity for the therapist to teach emotional regulation and disappointment management skills.

People or animal figures

How it can be therapeutic: Asking the child to use the figures to tell a story, show what their family looks like, or share their worries with the figure are all ways to help a child process their experiences and feelings in a less direct way.

Art

How it can be therapeutic: It can relieve stress, help a child use their creativity and left side of their brain, if using coloring utensils in both hands, it can also stimulate both sides of the brain (bi-lateral stimulation) and help with processing feelings.

Art can be used to help a child show what a worry or feeling looks like to them with shapes, colors, textures.

Books

How it can be therapeutic: I have children’s books in my office that cover a wide range of topics. I display the books in my office so children can see the covers and titles and request to read or look at them if they are interested.

Reading books with specific topics like parent incarceration, death, or adoption, can help generate conversations with the child about their own experiences or thoughts about the topics.

Play Is the Language of Children: See a San Jose Play Therapist

Play is the way children process their experience of the world and participating in play therapy can allow them to make sense of their experiences and feelings. It can help parents feel more connected to their children, because they are more attuned to what they are expressing through their play.

Play therapy isn’t just “playing in the therapy office.”

It’s an effective therapy that gives children a way to heal.

Looking for a Play Therapist for Your Child? Contact me for a free consultation.

About the Author: Hannah Ly, San Jose Child Therapist

Hannah Ly is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #129711) and the founder and clinical director of Your Therapy Nook, a boutique child and teen therapy practice with offices in San Jose and Redwood City, CA. She is a child therapist, play therapist, and teen therapist, trained in Synergetic Play Therapy and Brainspotting, with a long background in adoption and foster care. Hannah does every family's first call herself, and every therapist on the team practices the way she does. Every family gets child-led play therapy or teen therapy plus parent coaching every four weeks.