Hi! I’m so glad you chose to take this course! Thank you for choosing to learn with me!

I’m going to teach you as quickly as I possibly can because you are likely very busy working, being a human, and trying to survive in 21st-century America.  At this exact moment, I’m a professor with a three-year-old and a six-year-old, so I really do get it. 

First thing is first – so often, all of these parenting trainings and advice books are premised on this idea that you are not enough; that you need advice or else you’re going to mess your kids up. 

We live in an age of too much information, and our monkey brains can’t really handle it, so we have a lot of anxiety about doing things right.  As Esther Perel says, “The burden on the self has never been higher.”  So, I’d like to try to relieve you of that anxiety.  This isn’t about doing play perfectly.  It’s about feeling closer to your child a little bit at a time. 

How you feel about your child is more important than what you know. 

It's truly enough that you are setting an intention to spend quality time with your child.  If you can do special playtimes once a week for thirty minutes, great!  If you can only do them every other week for twenty minutes, that’s great too!  We’re just trying to create a predicable ritual of connection with your child.

We’ve all been through an incredibly stressful pandemic, so let’s all try to be gentle with ourselves.

Children communicate through play, so in this course, you’re going to learn how to pay attention to the stories that your child is telling and how to respond with a TON of emotional attunement.  

Setting your intention to do this is going to support your child’s social and emotional intelligence so much!  But it can’t possibly protect your child from ever feeling sad or scared or lonely.  Play therapy is just about helping your child to express and be with their uncomfortable feelings.

Lastly, this practice is known as Child-Parent Relationship Therapy or CPRT.  There are many more resources available related to CPRT if you’re interested, but this course provides you with a foundational overview. There’s more evidence about all of this on the Association for Play Therapy website: https://www.a4pt.org/general/custom.asp?page=PublicResearchResource

You can do this!!!  Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Let’s begin! 

Warmly,

Dr. Alison