How Play Therapy Supports Children with Autism, ADHD, and Anxiety
Play therapy is a core part of our DBI programs for children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety. Through structured and free play, children practice: – Social interactions (e.g., taking turns, sharing) – Emotional expression and regulation – Coping with frustration or transitions – Building attention and focus.
Our therapists use evidence-based play techniques like floor time, role-play, and sensory games. These activities are tailored to each child’s needs, helping them build confidence and resilience.
Education Tip: Parents can reinforce therapy goals by playing similar games at home—ask your therapist for ideas that fit your child’s interests and strengths.
Building Skills Through Play: How Play Therapy Supports Children with Autism, ADHD, and Anxiety
Every child deserves the opportunity to learn, grow, and thrive in ways that feel natural to them. For children navigating autism, ADHD, or anxiety, traditional learning environments can sometimes feel overwhelming or misaligned with how they naturally process the world. That’s where play therapy becomes transformative—it meets children exactly where they are and helps them develop essential skills through the universal language of play.
Why Play Therapy Works for Neurodivergent Children
Play therapy is a core component of our Developmental Behavioural Intervention (DBI) programs at Clear Health Solutions, and for good reason. Children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety often face unique challenges in social situations, emotional regulation, and managing daily transitions. What they need isn’t just instruction—they need practice in a safe, supportive environment where mistakes are learning opportunities and success is within reach.
Play provides that environment. It removes the pressure of “getting it right” and replaces it with exploration and discovery. For a child with autism who struggles with social cues, play therapy offers repeated, gentle practice in reading facial expressions and understanding turn-taking. For a child with ADHD working on attention and impulse control, games and structured activities build these skills incrementally. For an anxious child, play becomes a way to express worries that might be too big for words and practice coping strategies in manageable doses.
The brilliance of play therapy is that children don’t feel like they’re in therapy—they feel like they’re playing. Yet within that play, profound learning is happening.
The Skills We Target Through Play
Our play therapy programs focus on building foundational skills that support children across all areas of their lives. These skills don’t just help in the therapy room—they translate to home, school, and community settings.
Social Interactions: Learning to Connect
Social interaction can be one of the most challenging areas for children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety. The unwritten rules of social engagement—knowing when to talk and when to listen, understanding personal space, interpreting tone of voice—can feel like navigating a maze without a map.
Through structured and free play, children practice these skills in real-time. Taking turns during a board game teaches patience and the rhythm of reciprocal interaction. Sharing toys or materials helps children understand cooperative play and negotiation. Role-playing different social scenarios—greeting a friend, asking to join a game, or resolving a conflict—allows children to rehearse these interactions before encountering them in more unpredictable settings.
Our therapists carefully observe each child’s social challenges and create play opportunities that gently stretch their abilities. A child who struggles with eye contact might start with games that naturally encourage looking at others, like peek-a-boo or simple ball games. As comfort grows, we introduce more complex social play that requires reading others’ intentions and responding appropriately.
Emotional Expression and Regulation: Finding the Words and the Calm
Many children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety struggle to identify, express, and manage their emotions. An autistic child might not recognize the physical sensations that signal frustration is building. A child with ADHD might experience emotions intensely and react before they can think. An anxious child might feel overwhelmed by emotions but lack the tools to communicate what they’re feeling.
Play therapy creates a safe space to explore emotions. Through puppets, dolls, or action figures, children can act out scenarios and practice naming feelings. “I think the bear is feeling sad because his friend had to leave. What do you think?” This kind of guided play helps children build emotional vocabulary and recognize emotions in themselves and others.
We also use play to teach regulation strategies. Sensory games might help a child discover that squeezing playdough or jumping on a trampoline helps them feel calmer. Breathing exercises become fun when we pretend to blow up balloons or smell flowers and blow out candles. Through repeated practice in play, these strategies become tools children can access when they need them most.
Coping with Frustration and Transitions: Building Resilience
Frustration tolerance and transition management are significant hurdles for many children. A child with ADHD might have a low threshold for frustration when a task becomes difficult. An autistic child might struggle intensely when their routine changes unexpectedly. An anxious child might become paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes.
Play therapy allows children to experience manageable doses of frustration in a supported environment. When a puzzle is challenging or a block tower keeps falling, our therapists are there to model problem-solving and emotional regulation. “That’s frustrating! Let’s take a breath and try a different approach.” Children learn that frustration is normal, manageable, and doesn’t mean they should give up.
Transitions are practiced through play as well. We might use timers during activities to help children prepare for changes, or create visual schedules for play sessions that mirror the structure they need in daily life. Role-playing transitions—like getting ready for bed or switching activities at school—helps children mentally rehearse these moments and develop strategies that work for them.
Building Attention and Focus: Strengthening Executive Function
For children with ADHD especially, but also for many children with autism and anxiety, maintaining attention and focus can be exhausting. Play therapy helps build these skills through activities that are engaging enough to hold interest while gradually extending attention span.
Structured games with clear rules and defined endpoints help children practice sustained attention. We might start with a simple matching game that takes two minutes and gradually work up to more complex activities that require longer focus. The key is making the activity intrinsically motivating—when children are interested and engaged, they naturally practice attending for longer periods.
We also work on selective attention—the ability to focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions. Sensory games that require children to identify specific sounds, textures, or visual elements help develop this crucial skill.
Evidence-Based Techniques We Use
Our therapists are trained in specific, evidence-based play therapy techniques that have been shown to be effective for children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety.
Floor Time: Following the Child's Lead
Floor time, also known as DIRFloortime, is a relationship-based approach where therapists literally get down on the floor and enter the child’s world. The therapist follows the child’s lead, joining them in whatever activity interests them, and then gently expands that activity to encourage interaction, communication, and higher-level thinking.
For example, if a child is lining up toy cars, the therapist might join in, then introduce variations—”What if we make a garage for the cars?” or “Should we line them up by color or size?” This approach respects the child’s interests and natural play style while creating opportunities for growth.
Floor time is particularly effective for children with autism because it builds on their strengths and interests rather than focusing primarily on deficits. It also strengthens the child-therapist relationship, creating a foundation of trust that supports all other learning.
Role-Play: Rehearsing Real Life
Role-play allows children to practice real-world scenarios in a low-pressure setting. Our therapists might act out common social situations—meeting a new friend, asking a teacher for help, handling disappointment when a playdate is cancelled—and guide children through appropriate responses.
For children with anxiety, role-play is particularly powerful because it allows them to encounter feared situations gradually and practice coping strategies before facing the real thing. A child nervous about birthday parties might role-play arriving at a party, dealing with loud noises, and managing social interactions, building confidence with each rehearsal.
Role-play also helps children with ADHD practice impulse control and think through consequences. “If your character grabs the toy from their friend, what might happen next?” This kind of scaffolded thinking supports the development of executive function skills.
Sensory Games: Regulating Through the Body
Sensory processing challenges are common among children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety. Some children are sensory-seeking, craving intense input to feel regulated. Others are sensory-avoiding, becoming overwhelmed by stimuli that others barely notice.
Sensory games help children understand their sensory preferences and develop strategies for regulation. A sensory-seeking child might benefit from heavy work activities like pushing weighted objects or jumping games. A sensory-avoiding child might practice tolerating different textures through gradual exposure in play—starting with looking at a textured object, then touching it briefly, then playing with it for longer periods.
We incorporate sensory elements into many play activities: tactile bins filled with rice or beans for hiding and finding objects, movement games that provide vestibular input, listening games that develop auditory processing. These activities help children become more aware of their bodies and what they need to feel calm and focused.
Tailoring Activities to Each Child
While we use these evidence-based techniques across our programs, every child’s play therapy experience is unique. We recognize that a child with autism who is highly verbal will have different needs than a minimally speaking autistic child. A child with hyperactive ADHD will benefit from different activities than a child with primarily inattentive ADHD. A child with generalized anxiety requires different support than a child with social anxiety.
Our therapists conduct thorough assessments to understand each child’s specific profile—their strengths, challenges, interests, sensory preferences, and developmental level. We then design play therapy activities that align with where the child is and where we want to help them grow.
This individualized approach means that two children with the same diagnosis might have completely different play therapy sessions. One autistic child might work on pretend play skills through elaborate imaginative scenarios, while another might build social communication through structured games. The common thread is that both are learning and growing through play that feels right for them.
Building Confidence and Resilience
Beyond the specific skills children develop, play therapy does something even more fundamental—it builds confidence and resilience. Every time a child successfully navigates a social interaction in play, tolerates a frustration, expresses an emotion appropriately, or maintains focus on an activity, they experience success. They learn that they are capable.
For children with autism, ADHD, and anxiety, who often face more challenges and criticism than their neurotypical peers, these experiences of success are crucial. They counteract the negative self-perception that can develop when children repeatedly struggle. Instead of “I can’t,” play therapy helps children internalize “I can, with practice and support.”
Resilience develops through encountering appropriate challenges and learning to overcome them. In play therapy, we create opportunities for children to experience mild setbacks—a game that’s a bit too hard, a frustrating puzzle, a social misunderstanding—and then we support them in bouncing back. Over time, children learn that setbacks are temporary and surmountable. They develop the emotional flexibility to try again, ask for help, or adjust their approach.
The Ripple Effect Beyond the Therapy Room
The skills children develop in play therapy don’t stay confined to our therapy rooms. Parents consistently report seeing changes at home—a child who can now wait their turn at the dinner table, express when they’re feeling overwhelmed before having a meltdown, or transition from screen time to bedtime with less resistance.
Teachers notice improvements too. Children begin participating more in classroom activities, managing their impulses better, or engaging more comfortably with peers. These real-world applications are the ultimate measure of play therapy’s success.
We support this generalization by working closely with families. We teach parents the techniques we use and help them identify opportunities to practice skills at home. We collaborate with schools to ensure consistency across settings. The play therapy room is where skills are introduced and practiced intensively, but the whole world becomes a place where children can apply what they’ve learned.
Beginning Your Child's Play Therapy Journey
If you’re wondering whether play therapy might benefit your child with autism, ADHD, or anxiety, we invite you to reach out to Clear Health Solutions. Our team can discuss your child’s specific needs, answer your questions about what play therapy involves, and help you determine whether our DBI programs are the right fit.
Play therapy isn’t about “fixing” children—it’s about giving them tools, building their strengths, and helping them navigate their world with greater confidence and capability. It’s about honoring who they are while supporting them in becoming who they want to be.
Every child has the capacity to grow, learn, and thrive. Sometimes, they just need the right environment and the right support. Through play therapy, we create that environment—one where learning feels like playing, where challenges are manageable, and where every child can experience the joy of mastering new skills.
