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What does playing have to do with counselling?
If your child tells you that they spent their counselling session playing, you might understandably wonder where the counselling comes into it.
Especially for younger children, counselling is likely to involve a lot of play.
Children generally have a smaller emotional vocabulary than adults and are still developing their ability to understand and put words around big feelings and confusing experiences. Play gives them another language.
Through play, children can tell stories about their experiences, explore what they want, need or hope for, try things out and discover something about themselves and their relationships with other people.
Sometimes their play changes from week to week. Sometimes they may play the same game, tell a similar story or return to the same toys again and again.
The counsellor's job isn't necessarily to work out what the play means, though. Instead, much of the therapeutic work is in creating the conditions in which the child can play freely enough to explore whatever they need to explore.
That means paying close attention, responding with empathy and acceptance, and allowing the child to take the lead rather than directing their play towards something the adult thinks they should be talking about. There are still boundaries - including keeping the child and counsellor physically safe - but within those boundaries, there can be a great deal of freedom.
And something important can happen when a child repeatedly experiences an adult who is interested in their world without taking it over.
So if your child comes out of counselling and tells you, “We just played today,” that doesn't necessarily mean that the therapeutic work hasn't happened.
The playing may have been the work.