Child Play Therapy at Home: How-to Guide for Parents

Parents have the potential to be their young child’s best therapist! I don’t generally work with children under 6 in my private practice. For this age, I have found it to be far more effective to train parents to provide therapeutic experiences at home. As a new person in your child’s life, I have to develop a bond before I can begin to introduce therapeutic goals. With only 45 minutes a week in session, my initial progress can go slowly.

Most connected parents already have this strong rapport with their child and can skip to the good stuff! Using these simple-to-implement techniques, some parents see improvement in their child’s emotional regulation on Day One. Here are my three favorites:

1. Story-telling to process and heal.

Kids love hearing and telling their stories. Over and over and over. Younger children especially will not usually repress the urge to talk about surprising, hurtful, or scary things. Let’s say they fell off their bike and broke their arm. Encourage the child to tell everyone in their lives the story of how they got that cast. Help your child write the story down. Telling a story helps everyone organize the memory of what happened. A story that has been told many times can then be stored in a mental box marked “processed.”

Storytelling does not need to be verbal. Parents can initiate a drawing session, where both of you create images of the bike accident. Painting together can produce beautiful abstract versions of the event. My personal favorite is narrating a sequence of events through a comic strip template, on paper or with canva comic strips.

For younger children, try telling the story using imagination play. Propose a topic (i.e. “Let’s pretend Dolly is going out for a bike ride!”) and then follow your child’s lead. Remember play is a child’s natural therapy. They know how to do this far better than us.

Note: I do not suggest using this technique without professional guidance for a child with serious trauma. If the child does not feel safe and ready, telling or hearing the story of a significant trauma could be retraumatizing instead of healing.

2. Role-playing to have a corrective emotional experience.

Role-playing can be similar to story telling, but with a special twist: you can change the ending! While using puppets, costumes, dolls, and stuffed animals, you as a parent get to act out a better version of events.

When I was working in a Foster Home in China, we constantly played doctor. Most of the kids had severe medical trauma, so my playroom was full of real medical items to re-enact their experiences. With most kids I needed to spend at least 5-6 sessions on the story-telling stage. The child’s actual experience had to be processed and validated before we could move on.

Once we were ready, I put on my medical jacket and played the part of an empathetic, gentle doctor. I acted out how I wished they had been treated. The kids grew to love this game. After I had been doing this therapeutic game for a while, the medical caretaker at the home reported more compliance in the kids and less aversion to doctor’s visits.

Role-playing in play therapy is all about giving a child a better emotional experience through play. In the example of the bike accident, you can act out falling off a bike and not getting hurt. Or simply riding a bike with no incident!

Your aim is to give your child the message: Yes, you had this bad experience, but that doesn’t mean it will always be so bad.

3. Sensory play for reduction of anxiety.

Water, rice, sand, ice, bubbles, playdough, natural scents, goo, and slime are on rotation in my playroom. When possible, I like kids to go out into the mud and the streams. Sensory play is inherently calming for children. Children’s nervous systems can find equilibrium when experiencing their senses.

Don’t worry about creating some sort of complicated sensory project that you found on Pinterest. Sensory play is about being, not doing. I’m not a big fan of project-based sensory play, because I want the kids zoned out with a favorite texture, not concentrating on my instructions.

Think of sensory play as little kid meditation.


And finally, to parents about to embark upon some therapeutic play: take a minute to get grounded yourself before beginning. Make sure you are fully present with your child. Let go of any expectations of an epiphany! Let go of any expectations of cleanliness! Your own anxiety can deplete the activity of its stated purpose. Watch your child fully let go in their therapeutic play and enjoy letting go a little yourself.

Learn about how Child Therapy at South Boulder Counseling can help you here.