Play Therapy
What is Play Therapy?
Play Therapy is an effective therapy that helps children modify their behaviours, clarify their self-concept and build healthy relationships. In Play Therapy, children enter into a dynamic relationship with the therapist that enables them to express, explore and make sense of their difficult and painful experiences. Play Therapy helps children find healthier ways of communicating, develop fulfilling relationships, increase resiliency and facilitate emotional literacy.
Children use play as a form of communication. So often children referred to Play Therapy do not have the words to describe their thoughts, feelings and perceptions of their internal and external world.
Capturing the Child's Voice....what is Play Therapy?
Information for Children
What do Play Therapists do?
Play therapists work with children aged between three and eleven years of age, and occasionally adolescents, suffering from a range of psychological difficulties and complex life experiences. Psychological difficulties include depression, anxiety, aggression, learning difficulties and ADHD. Difficult life experiences include abuse, grief, family breakdown, domestic violence and trauma. A professionally trained play therapist helps a child to increase insight, to decrease internal conflict and to increase resiliency, coping and emotional literacy. Play therapists work closely with the child’s parents/carers throughout the play therapy intervention and occasionally undertake parent-child relationship interventions.
