Understand How Play Therapy Can Help Your Child
Maybe you’ve started becoming worried about how your child is responding to situations, transitions are difficult, they don’t want to try new activities, or maybe they’re having tantrums or meltdowns way more frequently than other children you know. Or maybe someone else has told you they have concerns about your child’s behaviour and recommend you bring your child to counselling. So now what?
You might have some understanding of what happens during a counselling session. You might even have attended counselling yourself and found it to be really helpful to be able to talk to a counsellor who helped you process your thoughts and feelings and make sense of why you respond the way you do. But yet, you have no idea how that might work for your child. I mean your child isn’t going to want to go and sit in a chair and tell an adult they don’t know what is happening and why they’re behaving the way they do. Your child can’t even explain it to you, and no way are they going to sit for a 50-minute counselling session!
These are great questions and wonderings, and this post will help you understand how a counsellor can help your child. The first clue to what happens in Play Therapy is the word play. Play is how children learn about the world and who they are. When children are playing it’s like they are “in” the play. It feels real to them. Ok, you might be thinking that sounds funny. What does she mean when she says my child feels like they are “in” the play? So, for a moment think about how you experience watching a TV show or a movie at a theatre. How many times have you jumped at a scary part, laughed at something funny or started crying when something sad happened? Yes, you know that the movie is not real and that it’s not happening to you, but in that moment it feels like you’re a part of what is happening. It feels real. This is what is happening to our children when they’re playing. They are creating the play based on their experiences. They get to try different versions of what could happen and how others will respond and how they might wish they could respond.
During play therapy, your child’s counsellor can use this to figure out what is happening for your child and what they are trying to work through. Your child’s counsellor will be able to see themes in your child’s play. They won’t necessarily know the specifics such as the name of the classmate your child is having difficulties with. Still, they will see that your child is trying to figure out how to navigate challenging social relationships. While your child is playing, right at the moment when something happens, your child’s counsellor can introduce new ideas and skills to help your child start to work through the challenges they are experiencing.