Play to Blossom

25/11/2025

The Therapist Parent 💗

18/11/2025

14/11/2025

❤️

In Play Therapy, children often take brave steps of their own — exploring difficult feelings, facing fears, and learning new ways to express themselves through play. Each small moment of trust, connection or creativity is a powerful act of growth. 🎨🧸

As BAPT Registered Play Therapists ®️, we see every day how providing a safe, consistent space helps children meet their own inner challenges — one play session at a time.

This , we celebrate the courage of children everywhere, and all those who work to help them thrive. 🌈

02/11/2025

Sarah R. Moore, Dandelion Seeds Positive Parenting 🩵

23/10/2025

21/10/2025

Mud & Bloom 💗

12/10/2025

In Play Therapy, children lead the way. When a child feels safe and accepted within a trusting therapeutic relationship, their natural language of play becomes the bridge to healing.

🎨 Through play, they can:

Communicate what they cannot yet put into words

Re-enact and process overwhelming or confusing life experiences

Try out new roles, ideas, and ways of being

Build resilience and confidence

Gradually widen their window of tolerance – their ability to cope with strong emotions and stress

BAPT Registered Play Therapists® provide that secure, accepting space where every feeling and story has a place — helping children move from surviving to thriving, one play session at a time. 💛

29/09/2025

Our emotional wellbeing plays a huge role in our heart health. Stress, anxiety, and unresolved emotions can affect not just our mind, but also our body. For children, these feelings can sometimes show up as big behaviours or physical symptoms like tummy aches or a racing heart.

Through Play Therapy, children are given a safe space to explore and express their feelings, helping to lower stress and build emotional resilience – which in turn supports their overall wellbeing, including their heart health. 🌈✨

Today, take a moment to:
💖 Pause and breathe deeply
💬 Talk about your feelings – no matter your age
🏃‍♀️ Move your body, even just a little
🥗 Nourish yourself with kindness and care

A healthy heart isn’t just about physical fitness – it’s about emotional balance too. 💕

25/09/2025

Often, we shut down big feelings. Rather than making space for them, we brush them away or try to fix them

Though this doesn’t remove the feeling, it encourages children to bottle it up, likely leading to a bigger outburst later in that same day or week. Or worse, teaching a child that emotions aren’t okay, leading to avoidance of emotions (which often leads to unhealthy coping strategies later on)

So instead, let’s get good at validating feelings. Validating a child’s feeling helps them to feel understood, and feeling understood is an essential ingredient in feeling connected and supported

Feeling understood helps us to put words to, or name our feelings, and over time, this supports with emotional regulation 🩷

Here are 10 things you can say to a child instead of ‘don’t cry’

If you found it helpful, feel free to give it a share - don’t forget to tag us 💙!

13/09/2025

The Therapist Parent 🧡

06/09/2025

❤️

We don’t need to protect kids from the discomfort of anxiety.

We’ll want to, but as long as they’re safe (including in their bodies with sensory and physiological needs met), we don’t need to - any more than we need to protect them from the discomfort of seatbelts, bike helmets, boundaries, brushing their teeth.

Courage isn’t an absence of anxiety. It’s the anxiety that makes something brave. Courage is about handling the discomfort of anxiety.

When we hold them back from anxiety, we hold them back - from growth, from discovery, and from building their bravery muscles.

The distress and discomfort that come with anxiety won’t hurt them. What hurts them is the same thing that hurts all of us - feeling alone in distress. So this is what we will protect them from - not the anxiety, but feeling alone in it.

To do this, speak to the anxiety AND the courage.

This will also help them feel safer with their anxiety. It puts a story of brave to it rather than a story of deficiency (‘I feel like this because there’s something wrong with me,’) or a story of disaster (‘I feel like this because something bad is about to happen.’).

Normalise, see them, and let them feel you with them. This might sound something like:

‘This feels big doesn’t it. Of course you feel anxious. You’re doing something big/ brave/ important, and that’s how brave feels. It feels scary, stressful, big. It feels like anxiety. It feels like you feel right now. I know you can handle this. We’ll handle it together.’

It doesn’t matter how well they handle it and it doesn’t matter how big the brave thing is. The edges are where the edges are, and anxiety means they are expanding those edges.

We don’t get strong by lifting toothpicks. We get strong by lifting as much as we can, and then a little bit more for a little bit longer. And we do this again and again, until that feels okay. Then we go a little bit further. Brave builds the same way - one brave step after another.

It doesn’t matter how long it takes and it doesn’t matter how big the steps are. If they’ve handled the discomfort of anxiety for a teeny while today, then they’ve been brave today. And tomorrow we’ll go again again.♥️