3 Easy Tips to Help Your Child Process Feelings Through Play (Even When You're Exhausted)
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In my last blog post I talked about how play is your parenting superpower. The thing is, play can be your parenting superpower even if you’re exhausted or you don’t have a lot of time.
It can even be your superpower if you don’t feel like you’re particularly good at playing.
In truth, spending just 30 minutes a week intentionally playing with your child can inspire big, positive, powerful changes in your relationship with your child.
This therapeutic play allows your child to feel heard, validated, and seen by you.
And isn’t something we all need?!
Using play helps your child process all of their big thoughts and feelings, worries and fears, excitement and joy, and the most important part of their play is YOU.
Your relationship with your child creates a sense of attachment and security they need to process all of those big things. You are their safe place—the place they can come to when they’re full-up—where they can lay all of their feelings at your feet.
By holding space for those feelings, you help them process them, move through them, and ultimately release them.
At the end of the day, children just want to feel heard and understood, and therapeutic play helps them do that.
Tip #1: Let Them Lead
One of the easiest ways to help your child process their feelings using play is to simply let them lead. Let your child direct the play they’re creating with you.
Like an actor in that play, you as a parent should take a step back and follow while they put themselves in the role of director. With this tactic, your child is the one with the vision. They will introduce you to the characters and lead you through the climax and the resolution.
When letting your child lead, it’s also important to key into signs that they have something they actively need to work through.
Bossy behavior and micromanaging are often signs of just that, so make sure to hold space for your child and be the assistant to their emotional processing.
Tip #2: Use the Stage Whisper
I talk a lot about making your child feel in control, so while you’re letting your child lead the play, use another tip I call the stage whisper.
The stage whisper is a technique where you act out your part in the dramatic play and then use whispers to pull yourself out of character and ask your child what you should do next. You’re becoming a living toy for your child, but you’re coming out of character just enough to get additional information about your child’s vision.
This empowers your child because you, the parent who is typically calling all of the shots, is now deferring to their vision and their ideas.
It also allows your child to meet their own needs in a situation when you just can’t read their mind.
Tip #3: Reflective Responding
Reflective responding is a lot like active listening where you’re focusing more on what the other person is saying, then paraphrasing their words and speaking them back.
During therapeutic play sessions, reflective responding allows you to step into a narrator role for your child. You do this by saying things like, “So, I see you’re building a house for your horse, and he is going inside to rest.”
Sprinkle it into your playtime dialogue as it feels natural—I promise that if you’re feeling awkward about it at first, you’ll get better with practice.
By verbalizing what your child is doing, you’re holding up a mirror to their play. Thus, you’re allowing your child to actively reflect on themselves and their play so that they have the opportunity to check-in with themselves.