Child Therapy & Play Therapy

A child’s work in the world is play, and it’s through play that they learn. From roughly three to ten, kids are still building the cognitive and reasoning machinery adults take for granted, so they don’t have the vocabulary to describe what’s happening to them the way you would. They can express all of it through play instead. It lets them run real scenarios without real consequences, acting out something that feels enormous, seeing how it goes, and working it through.

So a trained therapist uses their language rather than asking them to borrow ours. Watching the details is the work: which characters they choose, what the figures say to each other, what gets built and what gets knocked down. A child at play is showing you their world.

• Anxiety, clinginess, or fears that have started shaping the day
• Big behaviors and meltdowns that the household is organized around
• Grief after a death, a divorce, or a move
• Trauma, including things a child has never spoken about
• Trouble with friendships, or at school
• Sleep problems and regressions
• Children who don’t yet have the words, including kids with autism or developmental disabilities
• Parents who need coaching as much as their child needs sessions

Sessions are built around the sand tray, art, figures, and whatever else lets a child put their world in front of them. Nobody sits your kid down and asks how they’re feeling about the divorce. What comes out often isn’t what you’d predict either, because the thing most present for a child that day may not be the thing you booked the appointment about. Progress can be quiet and repetitive. A child may build the same scene week after week until it’s finished, and then be finished. With younger children, or when a child doesn’t have speech yet, much of the work becomes coaching you, and that can change how a household runs inside two or three sessions.

Available in person only.

Parents often arrive nervous, wanting their kid on best behavior, tidying toys, correcting them through the session. That’s not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for how your family actually works, mess and all, and there’s nothing to apologize for in your children being children.

Juniper Alves works through sand tray and art and has watched a child stage the same fight in the same forest week after week, never once speaking about what was happening at home, until the day he turned and said he was done.

Angel Veach works with younger children and with kids who don’t have words yet, coaching parents to read what their child is telling them and to give the child a way to say it back.