Relationship-Focused Play Therapy

This virtual training will focus on relationship-focused play therapy with children and their caregivers. We will review the primacy of play in children's overall development as well as the developmental stages of play in order to provide a framework for understanding our observations of children's play and help inform our assessments of areas of strength and challenge. We will consider how critical it is to be mindful of how our own personal experiences of play color our observations, as well as how gender and racial biases can distort how we see the play of children, particularly black children.

We will review the tenets of non-directive play therapy, how play therapy impacts the brain, and how to integrate our understanding of attachment, neuroscience, and play therapy within the context of relationships.