Did you know that play is the primary language of children?
If we want to learn how to communicate with our kids in ways that build
safety, closeness, resilience, and life skills, it’s time for us to
develop our own playfulness, and understanding about it!
This workshop aims to introduce parents to the fundamentals of the
relationship between play, playfulness and communication. You can
contribute to practical parts in keeping with your own comfort levels.
While it may feel like tiptoeing into something a little daunting, we
plan to make it safe and fun for parents to find out more. You will have
a chance to try some different approaches to parenting and tap into your
own inner wisdom and resources.
Every parent knows that children can communicate in ways that seem quite
extreme – showing big feelings and behaviours about what often seem like
small problems in reality! This can go on sometimes for hours on end, or
repeatedly. It can be exhausting to be around this kind of energy
triggering big feelings and behaviours in ourselves too, often keeping
us stuck in a kind of survival loop.
Understanding more about play and how it can be used to process and
transform big feelings/behaviours into useful life skills, is one of the
keys to a more satisfying and rewarding way to live in a family. But as
adults it’s not always easy to tap into playfulness, especially if we
grew up in atmospheres or environments where our own childhood needs for
play were inhibited, interrupted, or diverted too early.
As Psychotherapists who use play all the time to help children and
adolescents heal, we have come to understand the incredible power of
play in communication. We work with play as a natural healing process,
so it is no longer so frightening or overwhelming. This is the key to
play therapy, and we want to share some of our skills and knowledge with
you. Using a more playful approach parents can feel more empowered in
relationship with their child.
