About
Learn To Play Therapy is grounded in the research and clinical practice of Emeritus Professor Karen Stagnitti. The approach focusses on key components underlying pretend play ability. It aids early childhood professionals to understand the development of complex pretend play, as well as how to assess pretend play, how to engage children who don’t understand play, and how to facilitate pretend play ability alongside the child. The therapy process is tailored to each child using a child-centered, individually nuanced and responsive approach which meets the child where they are at, and engages them within their sphere interests, strengths, and enjoyment of play.
Learn To Play Therapy focuses on the child’s unique needs and passions, where therapists, caregivers, and educators actively engage with the child. They understand the child’s play ability, and participate in play alongside the child, attentively responding to their cues, and prioritizing their individual preferences and requirements.
Parents/carers are also welcomed into sessions to collaborate with the therapist, not only to upskill in their knowledge of their child’s play abilities, but also to experience enjoyment with their child through play.
This approach empowers the child to understand pretend play, and how it functions in social contexts. A solid foundation in pretend play equips the child with invaluable skills to navigate their social world, enhance their developmental journey, and cultivate a deeper sense of delight and contentment in spontaneous, self-initiated pretend play. Pretend play is like a melting pot as it also influences language, narrative language, problem solving, counterfactual reasoning, self-regulation, social awareness and the ability to be a player with other children. Additionally, Learn To Play Therapy can also offer some children a safe space to effectively experiment, learn, adapt and process new or difficult life situations.
The aim of Learn To Play Therapy is to create a safe and transformative space where children can explore, learn and grow, ultimately becoming more confident, competent, and autonomous individuals in their play and beyond.
Our mission is to empower early childhood professionals with the knowledge and skills to effectively use Learn To Play Therapy, enhancing the lives of the children they work with.
We are dedicated to providing high-quality training and resources that educate, inspire, and enable our participants to cultivate nurturing, imaginative, and growth-promoting environments for children, through their understanding of pretend play development within the Learn To Play Therapy approach.
Driven by the belief that every child possesses unique strengths and interests, we aim to nurture these qualities, ensuring that every child has the chance to develop essential life skills, emotional resilience, and find joy in play.
Learn To Play Therapy:
is child-centred
The child is seen as capable, accepted and respected as they are
respects
the child's perspective, joins them in play and is responsive to the child
affirms
the child's experience, and provides opportunities for new experiences
works with
the child's strengths and engages them within their sphere of interests
does not
promote masking or teach behavioural responses (this is an inappropriate use of Learn to Play Therapy)
understands
that belonging is a fundamental need which comes from being understood and accepted, not being 'taught' to fit in
knows
that true play is joyful, meaningful and intentional for the child
What is Play?
Play is a broad term, and within play there are many types of play:
Gross motor play or active play
is play using the whole body (or large muscles) and you can see this type of play when children jump, run, roll, skip, climb, throw balls etc.
Visual perceptual play
playing with puzzles, mazes, card games
Sensory play
play with sand, water, mud
Fine motor play
is activities using your hands such as threading, drawing, cutting, and turning pages of a book.
Auditory play
listening games, I spy
Pretend play
dressing up, creating play scenes
All types of play are important for a child’s development because through play children develop muscle strength and coordination, manipulation skills, looking and listening skills, and thinking skills. As children enjoy playing they also feel good about themselves and learn about their world.
Our focus is pretend play
(also called imaginative play, make-believe play, and symbolic play.)
It is the mature form of play and becomes more noticeable as children develop. It develops from simple to complex levels of ability, and in a sequence that is comparable across cultures.
Within all the different types of play,
pretend play is unique because there are three key thinking skills that children use when they pretend in play:
- children use objects as something else, like a box for a boat or a car;
- they attribute properties to objects, like a dinosaur being ‘thirsty’; and
- they pretend objects are there when they are not, like ‘hot’ tea in an empty cup.
Children pretend in play when they impose a meaning on what they are doing that is beyond what can be seen. The ability to pretend in play is about understanding the meaning of what is happening beyond the literal function of toys. It is ‘thinking play’.
Pretend play also includes play scenarios where children take on roles and pretend to be someone else, or pretend an object is real (such as a teddy being alive).
Essentially pretend play occurs when children imagine something.
Pretend play can also be imposed on other types of play:
Gross Motor Play
When children are running around they might also be pretending they are running in the Olympics or being chased by a crocodile.
Visual Perceptual Play
If the picture on a puzzle piece shows someone walking, children may start moving the puzzle pieces around in the air as if the person is walking.
Fine Motor Play
The activity may be threading a necklace but the ultimate goal of making the necklace is for the princess in the play scenario to wear it.
Pretend play skills are closely tied to various essential aspects of children's development. As pretend play becomes more complex, it contributes to better social-emotional and cognitive well-being.
Research has shown that children who can’t or don’t develop the ability to pretend in play are more likely to require some form of extra support or intervention during their lives.
Learn to Play Therapy is the culmination of three decades of clinical and research work from Emeritus Professor Karen Stagnitti.
Through her work as an occupational therapist working in early childhood services, being a doctoral candidate, and later as an academic researcher she began to understand how to observe and assess a child’s spontaneous ability to pretend in play and how to engage a child in the joy of play.
This understanding of a child’s play capability helped determine where to start when playing with children and what kinds of play activities captured their interests. It also aided in developing their play skills so they could spontaneously play by themselves and then with others.
Over the years, Karen observed and documented that building pretend play ability also positively influenced the child’s language ability, social interaction, self-regulation, and self-esteem as their complexity in pretend play deepened.
In 2021 the manual, Learn to Play Therapy. Principles, processes and practical activities, was published which is the accumulation of knowledge in practice over many decades.
Learn To Play Therapy
Learn To Play Therapy is a child-centred approach where the therapist/worker/teacher plays beside, with, and responds to the child to enable a deeper enjoyment and pleasure in spontaneous self-initiated, intentional, pretend play. Play is uniquely meaningful for the child and is an expression of that child’s world. The child and parent/carer are respected, accepted, and seen as capable. The aim is for the child to become autonomous in how they play, and how they choose to play with others. It is a responsive, complex therapy process that engages the child within the sphere of their interests, and their strengths and joy in pretend play.
As children develop their ability to enjoy and initiate their own pretend play, their capacity for engaging with resilience, autonomy, and happiness within their social and physical environment also develops.
The Pretend Play Enjoyment Development Checklist
In order to understand the increasing complexity of pretend play and to observe pretend play in children, Emeritus Professor Karen Stagnitti developed the Pretend Play Enjoyment Developmental Checklist (PPE-DC).
The framework of this play assessment breaks down pretend play into six areas:
Play scripts are the stories that children make up in their play. When children begin to pretend in play, the play scripts they make up reflect what they do in their daily life. You might see children pretend to talk on the phone, drink, cook, or give their toy character something to eat. As children’s understanding of their world increases, they include more about what they do in their life as well as fantasy stories which may include their favourite movie or storybook characters. By school age, children can make up any story in play. They can invent fictional stories, real stories from their own lives, and they may have adventures and go to places in their play that they totally create.
To play in a coherent way, children need to be able to sequence their play actions logically. Children begin with single repetitive actions in their play as they start to understand their world, and what they can do with toys and objects. As play becomes more complex, children begin to have short, simple, logical sequences in their play. For example, they may give a drink to their favourite toy character (for example, a teddy) by lifting the cup to the teddy’s mouth, and then telling the teddy it has had enough. Another logical sequence could be putting blocks in the truck, pushing the truck and taking out the blocks. By 4 years of age, children can carry out numerous action sequences to the extent that a play scenario can be developed over 2 – 3 days, and by 5 years of age, children can develop ideas in play over 2 – 3 weeks.
Object substitution occurs when a child uses an object in substitution for something else. For example, they use a block as a mobile phone or a box as a bed for a toy character. When children begin to develop this skill, they use objects that are physically very similar looking to the object they are intending. For example, children use the TV remote and pretend it is a mobile phone. By 4 years of age, children can use any object as anything. The object doesn’t have to look anything like what it represents. An example of this is using a teddy bear as an aeroplane.
Pretend play with peers or others is social pretend play. Children begin by watching and imitating others. By 3 years of age, children engage in lots of talking when they play beside and with others. At this age they are not ready to negotiate with peers and so in early childhood settings you may observe that 3-year-olds tend to have their own equipment. By 4 years of age, negotiation and cooperation with peers becomes a feature of play when children are socially interacting in play. By this age, you might observe them negotiating with a peer to have a turn on a bike or have a go with the spade digging in the sandpit. Of course, you might also observe arguing and fighting during play as children develop their ability to negotiate.
Role play by 4 and 5 years of age is clearly seen when children pretend they are a parent, shopkeeper, policeperson, astronaut etc. Role play is one of the more complex play skills because to be able to pretend to be someone else requires the child to have a good idea of what that person will say, how they will behave, what they believe and what their motivation is. For example, a shopkeeper’s motivation is to sell goods and a customer’s motivation is to choose which goods to buy. Before 4 or 5 years of age, children include roles in their play that they have observed within their society. Before the age of 4 years, they usually don’t spend a lot of time copying others but they may imitate different people over a day or throughout a week.
When children pretend in play, you may have observed them playing with a toy character (such as a doll or teddy) and interacting with this character as if it is alive and talking back to them. This ability is also termed ‘decentration’. That is, the child is able to step back and work out what the toy character is saying or feeling and respond to that character. When children show this skill in play, they are demonstrating the ability to understand that others may have a different view to them. Often in play, the toy character may have different emotions to the child or think different things to the child, and the child responds to them. For example, the child might be trying to feed a teddy but the teddy isn’t hungry and won’t eat.
The majority of children begin to pretend in their second year of life. Pretend play with toys and objects continues until about the age of 10 to 12 years, when children pack up their toys and their toy characters, stop talking to them and they return to just being toys. At this age, the expression of pretend play changes. All the pretend play abilities a child has developed “flips into their head” as the young person utilises these abilities through cognitive processes in their thinking and perceiving social and emotional situations.
Learn To Play Therapy focusses on these play abilities as well as imaginary representational thinking such as attributions of properties, reference to absent objects, problems in the play, and predicting what will happen next.
Crucial to Learn To Play Therapy is a child’s understanding of the intentionality of the play for themselves, which usually transfers to a recognition of the intentionality of the play in others.
Techniques used in Learn To Play Therapy revolve around responding to the child, shifting what happens in a session in response to the child’s interests, and co-regulating with the child in response to their level of stress and anxiety, and their engagement in play.
Effective therapy results in children transferring their play capabilities to other environments. As they learn to recognize the context of other children’s play, they gain the ability to choose if and how they participate in this play, how to respond when another child wants to play with them, and the freedom to determine their preferred way of playing independently. This is about increasing the child’s capacity to develop a strong sense of self in engaging or choosing not to engage with others.
Increasing these capabilities in childhood not only gives immediate benefit for social and cognitive development, but also lays down foundational skills for continued development later in life; especially for neurodivergent adolescents and adults as they develop further in their emotional connections within relationships (partners, friends, family), and their independence within the community.