Play & Filial Therapy

24/04/2026

It’s Anzac Day tomorrow here in Australia 🇦🇺! 🤍 White poppy is a symbol of peace, representing remembrance for all victims of war—both civilians and armed forces—and a commitment to nonviolent conflict resolution. 💜 Purple poppy is a symbol of remembrance specifically for animals that served and died in military conflicts, such as horses, dogs, and pigeons. ❤️ Red poppy is a widely recognized symbol of remembrance, honoring service personnel who died in wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations.

23/04/2026

Otters don’t stop playing when they grow up 🦦

They belly-slide on riverbanks. They wrestle. And they float on their backs holding something that caught their attention.

We have built an entire culture around the idea that play belongs to childhood.

Something to be grown out of. Traded in for productivity, seriousness, and the performance of adulthood.

The otter disagrees.

River otters are frequently observed playing and sliding together throughout their lives — and there is evidence that this play strengthens social bonds, improves skills, and maintains group cohesion. Not as juveniles. As adults. Consistently. Across a lifetime.

When we deprive children of play, we don’t just affect their childhood. We interrupt the sequence through which humans learn to bond, regulate, empathise, and belong.

And when we deprive adults of play?

Research tells us what the otter already knew. Play in adulthood sustains mental health, emotional resilience, and social connectedness. It reduces cortisol, fosters belonging, and protects against isolation, anxiety, and depression. Adults deprived of play become rigid in their thinking, brittle under stress, and much less open to handling the curve balls life throws. Play is essential for physical health, emotional wellbeing, social connectedness, and adult happiness — not as a luxury, but as a biological need that does not expire with childhood.

The otter plays as a pup.
The otter plays as an adult.
The otter does not apologise for either.
Play is not a phase you pass through on the way to adulthood. It is how life is sustained. 🌿

Nature Knows — A series of posts by Dr Play
📍 drplay.com.au

23/04/2026

I encourage schools across Australia and around the world to join the Play 31 Challenge!

Schools encouraged to celebrate the International Day of Play on 11 June with ‘Play 31 Challenge’

Play organisations across the UK and Ireland are calling on all schools to join the Play 31 Challenge on 11 June, marking the International Day of Play and celebrating every child’s right to play.

The United Nations has designated 11 June as the International Day of Play, recognising the power of play at the heart of a happy, healthy childhood. Inspired by Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that every child has the right to play, schools are encouraged to allow 31 extra minutes for play in the school day.

This year’s campaign theme is Protect play, protect childhood. By extending break times, supporting playful outdoor learning, or creating a giant ‘31’ from loose parts, schools can show their support for the power of play.

Evidence shows that happy and healthy childhoods are built on play. Play isn’t just fun, it’s essential. Schools have a unique and vital role in supporting children’s ability to learn, play, be active and experience nature.

Through play, children learn to forge connections with others, build a wide range of leadership skills, develop resilience, navigate relationships and social challenges, and conquer their fears. Play helps children to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Marguerite Hunter Blair, Chair of the UK Children’s Play Policy Forum, said:
“We are calling on schools to take on the Play 31 Challenge and make more time for play. At a time when children’s access to play is increasingly restricted, school environments can provide a range of rich play experiences which contribute to children’s improved health, happiness and life chances. And everyone can have some FUN!”

Robyn Monro-Miller, President of the International Play Association, said:
“International Day of Play serves to drive global awareness so all children can be beneficiaries of playful childhoods. It is wonderful to see the range of organisations collaborating to work with schools to drive this awareness across the UK and Ireland”.

This is a UK Children’s Play Policy Forum call to action and collaboration with IPA Cymru Wales, IPA England, IPA Ireland, IPA Northern Ireland, and IPA Scotland.

Find out more at https://childrensplaypolicyforum.wordpress.com
IPA Ireland https://www.linkedin.com/company/ipa-ireland/

22/04/2026

21/04/2026

The octopus is a solitary creature. It does not play socially. And yet it plays.

Individual octopuses will spend time bouncing objects back and forth in their tanks — not for food, not for survival advantage, but interacting with objects just for the sake of it.

The researchers who first investigated this identified three conditions required for octopus play to occur:
- The animal must be safe.
- Not stressed.
- And curious about something worth exploring.

Safe. And curious.
That’s it.

Octopuses haven’t shared a common ancestor with humans in at least 600 million years — and yet they independently evolved remarkable problem-solving abilities, curiosity, and intelligence.

Play didn’t travel from a shared ancestor. It arrived again. Separately. From scratch. Because across the deepest divisions in the animal kingdom, nature keeps selecting for curious minds in safe conditions.

This is the most fundamental argument for play that science has ever produced. Not that play builds skills or bonds or resilience — though it does all of these things. But that play is what curious minds do when they are safe enough to do it.

In an octopus. In a child. In anyone.
Make them safety. Give them something worth exploring. Then get out of the way. 🌿

Nature Knows — A series of posts by Dr Play
📍 drplay.com.au

21/04/2026

Dr Kate Renshaw is very much looking forward to
continuing to assist in how thriving kids is shaped across Australia. Thank you Alice Jordan-Baird MP and the thriving kids inquiry for hearing the child and family centred ways that play therapy, as an allied health profession, can inform the thriving kids landscape.

19/04/2026

A chimpanzee named Julie put a blade of grass in her ear 🐒✨

No reason. No function. Just — because.
Seven of her group members started doing it too.

Then Julie died.

The grass-in-ear behaviour continued.

What looks like pointless play had become something no one planned and no one could stop.

It had become culture.

Play is how culture begins. In every species. Including ours. 🌿

Nature Knows — A series of posts by Dr Play

19/04/2026

Earlier this year Professor Laura Lundy, Dr Evie Heard, and Elizabeth Graty Hood published the Mapping Children’s Involvement in Decision-Making Toolkit — a rights-based tool used with 154 children across 17 countries, grounded in UNCRC Article 12 and Lundy’s participation model. You can access the toolkit here:https://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/CentreforChildrensRights/CCRFilestore/Mapping%20Toolkit.pdf

With Laura’s encouragement, I’ve written a companion starter kit bringing play therapy and expressive arts into that framework. Four creative adaptations. Two audiences. One shared purpose: ensuring that the children who most need their rights upheld are included by the tools we use to hear them.

Free to download as PDF:https://www.playandfilialtherapy.com/_files/ugd/c223a1_7fd92d7274d843559f7c7a743822894f.pdf

18/04/2026

Play isn’t random. It isn’t frivolous. And it isn’t a reward.

It’s a basic need for thriving, infrastructure for joy, and a language. And once you know how to read it, everything changes.

Play code: cracked 🔓

17/04/2026

🐻‍❄️ A polar bear mother doesn’t eat for months.
So her cub is warm enough, safe enough, held enough — to play.

And that play? Research shows it’s what determines whether the cub survives his first year.

She whispers too. The most powerful predator in the Arctic whispers to her cub — gentle sounds, soft paw movements — so he feels safe enough to explore.

She gives everything so the conditions for play exist.Nature has always understood what we keep forgetting🌿

Nature Knows — A series of posts by Dr Play

16/04/2026

A thought from inside a giant bubble installation this week.
The play deprivation we talk about in children’s development is real, documented, and serious. What we discuss far less is the parallel experience in adults: a chronic deficit of genuine, non-instrumental play.
Bubble Planet describes itself as “a soft interval between the squareness of life.” That framing is more clinically accurate than it probably intended to be. Sensory immersion, aesthetic wonder, and purposeless exploration are not frivolous. They are restorative neurological experiences.
As a play therapist and researcher, I advocate daily for children’s right to play. I think we owe adults the same argument.
When did you last play? Not exercise. Not scroll. Play.

Bubble Planet Experience 🫧

15/04/2026

🐦‍⬛ What ravens teach us about play and the birth of intelligence.

Ravens are extraordinary. They plan ahead. They remember social relationships across years. They understand what others can and cannot see — a cognitive skill once considered uniquely human.
In systematic testing, ravens parallel great apes in both physical and social cognitive performance.

But the question that matters most for your children, your classrooms, and your communities is not what ravens can do. It’s how they got there.
Research identifies forming and maintaining social bonds as one of the main driving forces for the evolution of higher cognitive abilities in ravens.

And it begins in the nest. Raven nestlings show play behaviours at levels equal to — or above — maintenance behaviours and flight training.
A raven prioritises play over learning to fly.

This is the sequence nature designed:
🐦‍⬛ Safe relationship first
🐦‍⬛ Play within that relationship
🐦‍⬛ Intelligence emerging from both

The raven didn’t evolve intelligence and then become social. It became social — through play — and intelligence followed.

Nature Knows — A series of posts by Dr Play
📍 drplay.com.au