Play therapy is an interaction between a therapist and a child for the purpose of using the symbolic communication of play to ease the child's emotional distress. Children use play to express themselves when they do not have the verbal skills to convey troubling thoughts and feelings. Play therapy relieves clinical symptoms, promotes cognitive development, and helps children learn adaptive behaviors when emotional or social skills deficits exist.
Play therapy builds on the natural way that children learn about themselves and their relationships in the world around them, and allows expression of thoughts and feelings appropriate to their development. Through play therapy, children learn to communicate with others, modify behavior, develop problem-solving skills, and learn a variety of ways of relating to others.
“Non-directive play therapy may be described as an opportunity that is offered to the child to experience growth under the most favorable conditions. Since play is his natural medium for self-expression, the child is given the opportunity to play out his accumulated feelings of tension, frustration, insecurity, aggression, fear, bewilderment, confusion. By playing out these feelings he brings them to the surface, gets them out in the open, faces them, learns to control them, or abandons them. When he has achieved emotional relaxation, he begins to realize the power within himself to be an individual in his own right, to think for himself, to make his own decisions, to become psychologically more mature, and, by so doing, to realize selfhood.”
- Virginia Axline
Play therapy builds on the natural way that children learn about themselves and their relationships in the world around them, and allows expression of thoughts and feelings appropriate to their development. Through play therapy, children learn to communicate with others, modify behavior, develop problem-solving skills, and learn a variety of ways of relating to others.
“Non-directive play therapy may be described as an opportunity that is offered to the child to experience growth under the most favorable conditions. Since play is his natural medium for self-expression, the child is given the opportunity to play out his accumulated feelings of tension, frustration, insecurity, aggression, fear, bewilderment, confusion. By playing out these feelings he brings them to the surface, gets them out in the open, faces them, learns to control them, or abandons them. When he has achieved emotional relaxation, he begins to realize the power within himself to be an individual in his own right, to think for himself, to make his own decisions, to become psychologically more mature, and, by so doing, to realize selfhood.”
- Virginia Axline