Play Training

Play is how children think, rehearse, and repair.

New clinicians often treat play as what you do until the real session starts — a rapport-building preamble before the talking. That inverts it. For a child, play is the medium. It is where thinking happens, where the unspeakable gets staged at a safe distance, and where a child can try out an ending they cannot yet manage in life.

A four-year-old who cannot say “I am frightened that my father will not come back” can put a small figure at a window forty times in a row. That is not filler. That is the work, and your job is to recognise it, hold it, and know when to stay quiet.

• Play and Theraplay — child-led play, structured therapeutic activity, and why conflating the two matters.
• Development — Erikson’s stages as a map of what a child is working on, and scaffolding within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.
• Observation and modelling — what play reveals about cognition and social understanding, and what you are teaching whether or not you intend to.
• Online safety — the platforms you must not join, and why.
• Vetted resources — games, movement, and bibliotherapy that Orchard has found safe for both child and clinician.

Professional training for supervisees. This module is an orientation to play in clinical work; it is not a play therapy credential. Registered Play Therapist credentialing is a separate course of supervised training.

• Discuss your play plan for any new child client in supervision before the first session.
• Content that emerges in play — disclosures, re-enactments, indicators of harm — is clinical material and follows the same reporting and disclosure rules as anything spoken. See the Disclosures module.
• Nothing here changes your mandated reporting obligations.

Disclosures module HIPAA & FERPA module

In child-led play, the child decides who they are and what happens next.

Free-form, spontaneous, and driven by the client.

In play therapy the child chooses. What to play, how long, what the rules are, when it changes, and whether it makes any sense to you. The clinician provides the space, the materials, safety, and attention — and then follows.

This is not passivity. Following well is demanding: tracking without narrating, reflecting without interpreting prematurely, tolerating repetition, and resisting the pull to make the play productive. The restraint is the skill.

Given that space, children work out inner conflicts and confusions through spontaneous play. They externalise what they cannot articulate, rehearse outcomes, reverse helplessness by becoming the one in charge, and return to the same scene until it loses its charge. Much of this happens without a word of insight, and it works anyway.

Theraplay, developed by Ann Jernberg and further built by Phyllis Booth, is a structured, attachment-focused approach in which the adult leads. Activities are chosen and directed to build connection, regulation, and felt safety, usually organised around the dimensions of structure, engagement, nurture, and challenge.

It is playful, joyful, and often exactly what a child needs. But it is not true play, because the child is not driving it. It approximates play — it borrows play’s warmth, physicality and delight — while remaining adult-directed throughout.

That distinction matters clinically and ethically. A child in directed activity is having a different experience from a child in free play, and calling directed activity “play therapy” misdescribes what you are doing to families, to schools, and in the record.

Scaffolding: just enough support that the achievement is still theirs.

Children work a great deal out through spontaneous play. But not everything, and not every child. Where development has been interrupted — by trauma, by neurodevelopmental difference, by an environment that never made play safe — a child often needs more than space. They need developmental intervention and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development.

Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with support. Scaffolding is the support you supply inside that gap, and then withdraw. You offer just enough — a suggestion, a structure, a turn taken alongside them — that the child succeeds at something slightly beyond their independent reach, and then you step back so the achievement is theirs.

Applied to play, scaffolding might be narrating a stuck sequence, offering one prop that opens a next move, modelling a turn and handing it back, or holding the rules steady while a child manages losing. Too little and the child flounders. Too much and it becomes your play again.

Well-pitched play builds social, emotional, and academic skills, knowledge, and competencies at once — sequencing, counting, vocabulary, categorisation, perspective-taking, negotiation, planning, and frustration tolerance. A child who will not do a worksheet will keep score in a game for forty minutes.

What a child is working on shapes what their play is for. Use this to read the play, not to grade the child.

What a child makes shows you how a child thinks.

As children engage in various forms of play, you have the opportunity to observe capacities no questionnaire will show you.

Watch across sessions and note what you see. This is clinical data and belongs in your conceptualisation.

A child learns more from how you take your turn than from anything you say about turn-taking.

While engaging in play the clinician has continuous opportunity to model appropriate social and friendship behaviours, and to demonstrate values and morals in action rather than instruction. A child learns more from how you take your turn than from anything you say about turn-taking.

At all times you are offering the child practice in:

• Good gamesmanship — winning without gloating, losing without collapse, congratulating an opponent
• Manners — please, thank you, waiting, asking rather than grabbing
• Appropriate social conversation — small talk, interest in the other person, staying on topic, repair after a misstep
• Taking turns — including the wait, which is the difficult part
• Sharing — materials, attention, the spotlight, and the decisions

Model honestly. Play to a real standard rather than throwing every game — children detect false losing and learn from it that they are fragile. Let them win genuinely, and let them lose sometimes, and be the same person either way.

That is the practice’s stance on competition, and it is worth saying aloud to children rather than leaving implied. It gives a losing child somewhere to stand, and it gives a winning child a bigger idea of what winning means.

Share your screen from your own device. Never join an account of theirs.

This is a practice rule, not a recommendation.

Children will invite you into the games they already play. Declining warmly, and offering something else, is part of the work. You do not join them there, for three separate reasons.

1. Privacy. These platforms are not HIPAA compliant and Orchard has no business associate agreement with them. Accounts, chat logs, and activity are held by the company, and a session held there is not confidential in any sense we can stand behind.
2. Security. Consumer gaming sites carry real exposure to malware and account compromise. A clinician’s device holds client information; it is not a device to take risks with.
3. Boundaries. A therapist inside a child’s social gaming world is in their peer space, visible to their friends, on a platform with private messaging. That is a boundary problem waiting to become an incident.

Some of the most popular children’s games and chat services are places where predators seek out and groom children. Children and youth are actively targeted online for sexual exploitation and trafficking, for the production of abuse material, for drug involvement, and for recruitment into violent extremism.

Moderation on these platforms is weaker than parents assume, and determined users work around it. In one widely reported case on Roblox, users found that the platform’s automated profanity filters did not inspect the artwork on custom avatar clothing, so text written into those images passed through unchecked. The general lesson matters more than the specific example: automated safety systems inspect some channels and not others, and people intent on reaching children look for the gaps.

• Use only sites Orchard has vetted. The Games tab lists the current set.
• Share your screen from your own device rather than joining an account of theirs.
• No account creation, no logins, no personal information, no chat features.
• Preview any new site fully before using it with a child, including its chat and social functions.
• Propose additions to the vetted list through your supervisor. Do not add sites on your own.
• Watch for advertising. Free game sites carry ads, and ad content is not vetted by anyone. Use an ad blocker and be ready to move on quickly.

Strategy, turn-taking, and how a child handles losing.

Orchard has identified a selection of game sites that have consistently been safe for both the child and the clinician. Share your screen; do not create accounts.

No screen, nothing to break, and the focus stays on the two of you.

These work over telehealth, cost nothing, cannot break, and put the focus on the two of you rather than a screen. They are often the better choice.

• I Spy — “I spy with my little eye…” Works over video using whatever is visible in either room. Good for attention, description, and perspective-taking, since the child must consider what you can actually see.
• Charades — acting without words. Reveals a great deal about expressive capacity, inhibition, and willingness to be silly in front of another person.
• Guessing games — name this animal, vegetable, or mineral; twenty questions. Excellent for categorisation, hypothesis testing, and tolerating not knowing yet.
• Story building — alternate sentences to build a story together. Sits close to true play, since the child steers the content.

Movement regulates. Finish slow and heavy, not at the peak.

Games and play promote vestibular, proprioceptive, and fine and gross motor development.

The vestibular system, driven by the inner ear, governs balance and the sense of where the body is in space. It is fed by spinning, swinging, rocking, tipping and turning. The proprioceptive system reports position and force from muscles and joints, and is fed by pushing, pulling, carrying, squeezing and climbing. Both are deeply regulating. Children who seek movement constantly, or who avoid it entirely, are often telling you something about these systems.

Gross motor work — jumping, balancing, crossing the midline, moving to a beat — and fine motor work — drawing, building, manipulating small objects — both belong in sessions, and both are observable online.

• Reposition your camera and stand up. You can lead movement, stretching, and yoga from a laptop if the camera can see you.
• Check the child’s space first — room to move, clear floor, nothing to fall against. Ask them to show you.
• Confirm an adult is at home and reachable before anything active.
• Do it with them. A clinician who instructs from a chair while a child jumps has changed the activity into a task.
• Watch for overstimulation. Vestibular input is powerful, and some children escalate quickly. Finish with something slow and heavy — a stretch, a press, a long breath — rather than stopping at peak.
• Follow any occupational therapy plan already in place rather than improvising alongside it.

Stories teach children about every aspect of life, at a distance that makes the lesson bearable.

A picture book lets a child meet their own experience in someone else’s shape. The monkey is grumpy, not them. The octopus is anxious, not them. That distance is exactly what makes the conversation possible, and it is why bibliotherapy reaches children who deflect direct questions.

Orchard maintains an electronic library of over 900 books. Read-aloud versions of many popular titles are also freely available online.

• Read it yourself first. Always. Some books resolve in ways that would land badly for a particular child.
• Stop and wonder aloud rather than quizzing. “I wonder what he’s feeling right now” opens more than “how do you think he feels?”
• Let the child hold the connection to themselves. Do not make it for them.
• Reread. Children ask for the same book because they are still working on it.
• Send the title home so the family can continue it.

• Axline, V. M. Play therapy. Ballantine Books.
• Booth, P. B., & Jernberg, A. M. Theraplay: Helping parents and children build better relationships through attachment-based play (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
• Erikson, E. H. Childhood and society. W. W. Norton.
• Erikson, E. H. Identity: Youth and crisis. W. W. Norton.
• Landreth, G. L. Play therapy: The art of the relationship. Routledge.
• Piaget, J. Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. W. W. Norton.
• Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
• Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100.
• American Counseling Association. ACA code of ethics.
• Association for Play Therapy. Play therapy best practices and credentialing standards. a4pt.org