Children can benefit from therapy just as adults do, but they usually don’t have the developmental maturity to express their problems through speech. However, they are able to do this through the medium of play – building, painting, pretending, creating. Play therapy allows children to work through their feelings such as anxiety, sadness, anger or fear in the presence of a therapist. In play therapy, they learn to cope with difficult emotions, find solutions and change the way they think and feel about their concerns.
Play therapy has been shown to be effective for a wide variety of issues children experience including birth of a sibling, divorce, illness, chronic anxiety or sadness, hospitalization, relocation and sexual/physical/emotional abuse.