Play Therapy Themes
One of the most common questions therapists ask after a play therapy session is: "What was that all about?"
Perhaps a child spent the whole session locking everyone in prison. Maybe they rescued baby animals over and over, built impenetrable walls, buried dinosaurs, or insisted on winning every game.
As play therapists, it's natural to wonder what these patterns might mean. The key word, though, is might.
In child-centred play therapy, themes aren't codes to crack or behaviours to diagnose. They're emotional experiences that children repeatedly explore through play. As themes emerge across multiple sessions, they can offer valuable clues about the child's inner world, helping us respond with greater empathy and intentionality.
Below are some of the most common play therapy themes I see in practice.
(Psst: my Play Therapy Themes guide has 12 cheat sheets on each of the below themes!)
1. Safety & Security
When a child doesn't yet feel emotionally safe, their play often becomes a place to experiment with finding, losing and rebuilding that sense of security.
These themes can include:
Safety & Danger
Vulnerability
Nurture & Care
Abandonment, Separation & Reunion
Safety & Danger
Children exploring safety often create worlds where danger feels close by. There may be monsters, natural disasters, intruders, weapons or characters constantly under threat. Sometimes the danger is defeated; other times it keeps returning. Rather than assuming these scenarios reflect literal experiences, they often represent a child's ongoing attempt to understand what feels safe, what doesn't, and whether someone will help protect them.
Vulnerability
Some children repeatedly create situations where characters become injured, trapped, sick, small or powerless. Others carefully protect fragile toys or rescue vulnerable characters. Beneath these stories may be questions about what happens when someone is hurt, helpless or in need of care—and whether it's safe to rely on others.
Nurture & Care
Nurturing themes often involve feeding babies, caring for animals, putting toys to bed or helping characters recover. While these moments can reflect affection, they may also represent a child's desire to receive comfort themselves, practise caregiving, or make sense of relationships where care has felt inconsistent.
Abandonment, Separation & Reunion
Characters leaving, becoming lost, being forgotten or eventually finding one another again are incredibly common in play therapy. These themes aren't limited to children who have experienced significant loss; even everyday separations, transitions or uncertainty can find expression through repeated stories of goodbye and reunion.
2. Power & Identity
Many children use play to answer an important developmental question: "Do I have any influence in my world?"
These themes often appear when children are exploring competence, autonomy, fairness or their sense of self.
They include:
Power & Control
Mastery & Competence
Justice & Fairness
Power & Control
Children may become the boss of everyone, make strict rules, imprison characters, take valuable objects or insist on controlling every aspect of the session. While this can sometimes look oppositional, these stories often reflect a child experimenting with agency in a world where they may otherwise feel powerless. Power isn't always about dominance—it can also be about discovering, "Can I make something happen?"
Mastery & Competence
Building, fixing, practising, winning, solving problems and overcoming increasingly difficult challenges are all common expressions of mastery. Through these experiences, children test their capabilities, develop confidence and experience the satisfaction of "I can do hard things."
Justice & Fairness
Some children become deeply invested in rules, consequences and making sure everyone gets what they deserve. Heroes defeat villains, cheaters are punished and "bad guys" are sent to jail. These stories often reflect children making sense of fairness, accountability and how the world ought to work.
3. Emotional Processing
Play gives children a way to experience difficult emotions at a pace they can manage.
Rather than talking about big feelings, they often show us.
Common emotional processing themes include:
Anxiety & Hopelessness
Loss & Grief
Anxiety & Hopelessness
Children may repeatedly create impossible situations, overwhelming disasters or characters who believe nothing will ever get better. Others prepare endlessly for danger or struggle to complete simple tasks within the play. These stories can reflect uncertainty, overwhelm or worries that feel too big to put into words.
Loss & Grief
Loss isn't only about death. Children may grieve friendships, routines, homes, schools, pets or family changes. In play, grief may appear through repeated disappearances, broken relationships, funerals, missing objects or characters trying desperately to get back what they've lost.
4. Growth & Connection
Not every theme centres on distress.
Many children also use play to explore hope, relationships and emotional growth as they move towards greater confidence and connection.
Belonging
Characters may search for a family, find somewhere to live, join groups or wonder where they fit. Some children repeatedly include or exclude characters, testing what it feels like to be accepted, welcomed or left out. These stories often speak to a child's need for connection and secure relationships.
Hope & Resilience
As therapy progresses, many children naturally begin creating stories where challenges can be overcome. Characters become braver, ask for help, discover strengths or find creative solutions. Hope isn't about pretending everything is okay; it's about discovering that difficult experiences can be survived and that new possibilities exist.
Themes are invitations, not answers
No single play behaviour tells us exactly what a child is experiencing. A child who steals treasure isn't automatically exploring power. A child who repeatedly rescues babies isn't necessarily working through attachment. The same behaviour can serve many different emotional purposes depending on the child, their developmental stage, their experiences and the wider context.
Themes are most helpful when they emerge consistently across time and are held with curiosity rather than certainty. They're not conclusions. They're invitations to wonder alongside the child.
Looking for a practical reference?
Recognising themes becomes much easier when you have a framework to organise what you're seeing.
That's exactly why I created the Play Therapy Themes Guide.
Each guide explores a theme in greater depth, including:
how it commonly appears in play
reflective questions to support your clinical thinking
therapeutic response ideas
caregiver-friendly explanations
the emotional needs that may sit beneath the play
They're designed to help you move beyond simply noticing patterns and towards responding with greater confidence—while still honouring the uniqueness of every child's story.
Ever found yourself thinking: "This play feels important... but what theme am I actually seeing here?" 🤔
Cue therapist staring thoughtfully at the sand tray while mentally flicking through every play therapy textbook ever written...
This guide was created for those moments.
Inside you'll find a collection of ready-to-use reference guides covering the 12 most common play therapy themes, designed to help you move from "something's happening here" to "I have a thoughtful clinical hypothesis to explore."
⚡ SAVE $$$ when you buy this in My Big Caregiver Consultation Pack or My Big Clinical Skills Pack!
WHAT’S INSIDE
★ A complete overview of 12 key play therapy themes
★ Common toys and play expressions you might notice
★ Why a child may use this theme to process their experiences
★ How it might show up outside the playroom
★ How it might show up inside the playroom
★ Therapist reflections you can use in session
★ Clinical hypotheses and formulation ideas
★ A trauma-informed caregiver explanation with conversation starters
WHAT’S INCLUDED
You’ll receive an email with a PDF link to download the digital document.
