An Intentional Step Toward Supporting Your Child
As a parent, you’re always doing your best to make thoughtful choices for your child. When it comes to therapy, it’s completely normal to feel unsure or to wonder if it’s the right next step. Therapy isn’t about right or wrong. It’s simply another way to offer support. Choosing therapy means you’re paying attention to your child’s needs and giving them space, understanding, and tools to help them grow in a healthy way.
Understanding Children Through Play Therapy
Children are still learning how to understand, process, and express their feelings, wants, and needs. They aren’t yet able to sit and talk about their emotions like adults can and that’s perfectly normal. This is where play becomes essential. Play therapy is a developmentally appropriate way to help children work through emotions, life events, stressors, and relationships. Play is their natural language, allowing them to feel heard, seen, and understood.
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As a parent, you’re looking for someone who truly understands this. Someone who uses your child’s natural language to gain real insight into their world. You want a therapist with the knowledge, training, and experience to guide your child in expressing emotions safely, while holding space with empathy and without judgment, for both your child and for you. You need someone who values safety, validation, and support, and who will meet your family exactly where you are.
Play therapy uses a child’s natural way of learning and expressing themselves: play within a therapeutic relationship. Just as adults use talk therapy, children use play to process thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a developmentally appropriate way.
The Association for Play Therapy (APT) defines play therapy as the intentional use of play by trained therapists to help children resolve emotional and behavioral difficulties and support healthy growth and development.
Content adapted from the Association for Play Therapy (a4pt.org).
Serving Gainesville, Alachua, High Springs, Newberry, and surrounding Florida communities.
Telehealth offered statewide to Florida residents.
