CHILDREN'S PLAY THERAPY
Our Children's Cottage offers a unique environment for children.
Play is basic to the development of a child's physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and spiritual well-being. Play Therapy provides a safe avenue and place for children to express themselves freely in a manner most natural to them … through PLAY!
Did you know?
- Play is the child's natural way of communicating just as talking is the adult's natural way of communicating.
- During play, children learn about their physical surroundings, their own capabilities and limitations, social rules, and the difference between fantasy and reality.
- Play promotes healthy development in children.
- Children can often communicate their difficulties more effectively through play than they can through language.
How will Play Therapy benefit your child?
Research supports the effectiveness of Play Therapy with children experiencing a wide variety of social, emotional, behavioral, and learning problems, including post-traumatic stress; conduct disorder; aggression; anxiety/fearfulness; depression, ADHD; impulsivity; low self-esteem; reading difficulties; and social withdrawal. Play Therapy has been used successfully with children whose problems are related to life stressors, such as divorce, death, relocation, hospitalization, chronic illness, physical/sexual abuse, domestic violence, and natural disasters
Play Therapy can help your child:
- Learn to set their own boundaries and how to comply with social and school rules.
- Experience their own strengths to help resist peer pressure, bullying, and victimization.
- Accept responsibility for their own behavior and learn skills to replace inappropriate behavior with more successful behavior.
- Develop problem-solving skills to resolve their own problems.
- Learn to respect themselves, others, property of others, and school property.
- Learn stress and anger management skills and appropriate ways to identify and express their emotions.
- Learn better communication skills that will help them relate to peers.
- Experience relief from emotional barriers that decrease attention and self-control
Children's Cottage
Our Children's Cottage offers a unique environment for children including a Sand Tray Therapy Room to enhance the work with children and adolescents. The purpose behind sand therapy is to allow an individual to use objects and figurines that represent a metaphor for the problems and solutions in the life of a child or adolescent. Sand tray pictures represent feelings and fears in a child's life and assist the counselor in working with the child to solve problems, change behavior, and bring peace and satisfaction back into their lives.