Play is Your Superpower: How to Help Your Child Process Big Emotions with Play Time
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Children are small vessels of beautiful chaos, curiosity, and emotions! They move through their world like a sponge, soaking up their experiences with wide eyes and open ears. But big experiences create big feelings, and children need a way to process all of it.
Fortunately, they are naturally programmed with such a skill: PLAY.
Play is children’s language. It is the natural way they communicate, process, and learn.
With everything going on in today’s world, many parents are seeing their kids’ play change. Many parents are seeing more illness and sick play, more doctor role-playing, and themes like isolation and even aggression.
If you’re seeing these changes in your child, you’re not alone. Think of these changing themes as signals, signs that they need to work through the changes in their world.
While I deep dive into this in my paid course, Playful Healing, therapeutic play can be used effectively as a strategy to help your child work through these big emotions.
What is Therapeutic Play?
Let’s take a step back for just a moment and just define what I mean when I say therapeutic play.
Therapeutic play is the process we use when we help our children work through their emotions so that they can process them constructively and them move through those feelings.
It’s like your child is standing on the other side of a waterfall where the water represents their big feelings. Therapeutic play is taking their hand, moving through the falling water, and then coming out the other side ready to dry off and keep walking.
How to Foster Therapeutic Play Sessions
As a parent, play is your superpower. You have the unique ability to create an environment where therapeutic play sessions can happen because you have the close relationship with your child that you do.
When children are dealing with a lot of changes, stress, schedule disruption, or missing their loved ones, their behavior changes. Children may act out more, have difficulty falling asleep or sleeping alone, or exhibit more attention-seeking behaviors.
These are signs of stress. They’re a call for therapeutic play.
If we’re thinking about play as children’s language, creating an environment where therapeutic play can happen means giving them the words to speak their language. In this case, those words are their toys.
“Play is their language, and toys are their words.”
- Laura Froyen, PhD
We want good results to come out of their playtime, so we need to be conscious and intentional about what we’re giving them to play with.
3 Essential Types of Toys
When choosing the best toys for therapeutic play, think about what types of toys will help them express themselves. These are often open-ended toys that they can use in a variety of different ways.
For example, the toy horse could be a cowboy’s mode of transportation one moment, a knight’s jousting horse the next, or a patient in their exam room the next.
There are 3 types of toys to focus on providing your child.
Real-life Toys
These types of toys include things like cooking instruments, school supplies, doctor’s kits, baby dolls, or figurines. They allow children to process what they are seeing in real life by acting it out.
Power Toys
Toys that provide an outlet for power play and aggression are also essential, though it can be jarring for parents at times. It’s important to remember that anger and aggression are natural emotions that children feel. By giving them toys to express these themes in play, you are providing a constructive way for them to vent and work through those feelings.
These toys include things like nerf guns, ropes, and swords.
Power toys allow them to feel powerful and in control—something children don’t often feel for the majority of their daily life.
Creative Toys
Creative toys are toys that allow children to take their thoughts and translate them into something tangible. Providing arts and craft materials along with building materials is important.