Play therapy for children under 7

Play therapy is therapy for children who are too young to make use of talking. A small child does not have the vocabulary to explain that something at school frightens them, or that the house has felt different since a grandparent died. What they do have is play — and in play the thing comes out anyway, in what keeps happening to the small figure, in what the game refuses to let anybody win.

A trained clinician sitting in that room is not simply keeping a child entertained. They are watching for the pattern, working inside the child's own material rather than importing an adult frame onto it, and gradually offering the child a way to change what happens next.

PHC uses two approaches together. Child-Centered Play Therapy is led by the child: they choose what to play with and what to do, and the clinician follows, reflects and keeps the room safe. Targeted directive techniques are led by the clinician: a specific game or task set up to work on a specific thing — turn-taking, tolerating losing, naming a feeling, managing a transition. Which of the two is doing most of the work depends on the child and on what the assessment found.

Parents are part of it, not outside it. You are told what is being worked on, what the clinician is seeing, and what to try at home.

What it is not: it is not a lesser version of real therapy, and it is not babysitting with a qualification. It is also not something a child is given before anyone has worked out what is going on. Whether it is what is indicated for your child is a clinical decision made after an initial session, not a choice you have to make from a website.

Why there is no timeline on this page. You will not find a number of weeks here, and that is deliberate. How long anything takes depends on the child, on what the assessment found, and on what is happening around them — and a figure printed on a website that your child then does not match is a hard thing for a parent to carry. What you will be given instead is a review, with you, of what is being worked on and whether it is doing what it was meant to.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. No child starts play therapy here because a parent asked for it by name — they start it because an initial session found it was what the situation called for.

1. An initial session.We ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing your child and your household. Much of this first conversation is with you rather than with the child. Where the picture needs more than a conversation, learning and achievement assessment or ADHD and autism assessment decides which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted.
2. A clinician matched to what that found.Clinicians at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your child's presenting needs and clinical fit. If the fit is not right, tell us and we will move you to someone else.
3. 50-minute sessions, in clinic.Young children's play therapy is delivered in clinic rather than online — the room, the materials and the clinician's ability to see the whole child are part of the method. If a session runs over and your clinician has the time, you can extend by an hour at an extra fee, and you are told what that is beforehand. Minor overruns of one to five minutes are not charged.
4. Reviewed as it goes, with you.What is being worked on is revisited rather than assumed, and you are part of that review. Where the difficulty is behavioural, Applied Behaviour Analysis may be used alongside. As a child gets older and can work with their own thinking out loud, the same ground is usually covered through CBT instead; where the pattern is really between the adults, family psychotherapy may be the better unit of work.

At PHC, play therapy is for children under 7 — that is PHC's own stated age band — with developmental, behavioural or emotional difficulties. It is used with children who are not yet talking much, with children who talk a great deal and still cannot say the thing, and with children who would refuse a conversation about it outright.

It is not the right service for everything, and PHC will say so. Where an assessment points to a learning difficulty that needs testing rather than therapy, where speech or occupational therapy is the indicated route, or where a paediatric or psychiatric opinion is needed first, you will be told that plainly and referred on rather than kept. Older children, adolescents and adults are worked with through the talking therapies.

Each of these has a page of its own explaining what PHC does about it. Play therapy is named on all five as a modality that may be indicated for a young child — which one applies to your child is decided at the initial session.

• ADHD
• Parenting difficulties
• OCD
• Anger difficulties
• Autism

These are five of the presentations play therapy is used for at PHC, not all of them. See every condition we work with.

PHC also delivers student wellbeing, teacher support and parent awareness sessions inside schools.