Helping You Support Your Child Through Connection and Play
Play therapy is a proven method to help children express their emotions, process challenging experiences, and build resilience and coping skills. When we engage with children through play, we are essentially speaking their language. This is how the make sense of the world around them from an early age and it allows them to process situations, both the good and the challenging.
By opening up their world of play and becoming involved, we can support them through grief, loss, and life transitions in a way that feels natural and safe.
Whether your child, or a child in your care, is struggling with big feelings, adjusting to loss or change or maybe you have noticed behavioural changes that are causing you concern, introducing play as a way of engaging with your child can help you to help them.
Available Parent Child Attachment Play (PCAP) Training: Strengthening Bonds and Building Trust
Parent Child Attachment Play (PCAP) is a structured approach that enables parents and caregivers to strengthen the relationship and build deeper connections with their children, or children in their care, through dedicated weekly play times.
Through these purposeful play opportunities, the overall sense of security and wellbeing of the child improves and we see a positive impact on the emotion and behavioural challenges.
Benefits of PCAP:
– Enhances parent-child connection, leading to more harmonious relationships at home.
– Supports emotional regulation in children by giving them a safe space to express their feelings.
– Increases attachment security, which is vital for a child’s emotional and social development.
– Helps parents manage time, environment, and interactions more effectively, leading to positive behaviour changes.
– Creates a sense of trust and safety, making family life more manageable.
Practical Skills for Lasting Change
My delivery of Parent Child Attachment Play training is designed to equip you with the skills and tools needed to bring PCAP into your home or care setting. This training is ideal for parents, as well as practitioners who work closely with families and want to use effective play therapy techniques to support the child.
Through this training you will understand how to manage time, environment and emotions to help support your child in making helpful choices.
Click on the button below to send me an email and I will be in touch to book a discovery call.
How the Training Works:
The training involves sharing three core skills that can be delivered as group training over a weekend or as 1-hour sessions over a number of weeks. This CPD-accredited course provides you with the skills, tools and knowledge to confidently apply PCAP to problematic areas in your home or setting.
During the interactive sessions you will be guided through key concepts, including:
Play Techniques: Learn how to select and use toys and activities tailored to your child’s preferences
Containment Strategies: Discover how to create a structured environment where your child feels safe and supported, helping them make positive choices.
Head, Heart, and Hands: A powerful attachment tool rooted in evidence-based Reflective Functioning.
After the training, you’ll be equipped to implement short, weekly “You and Me” play sessions at home. These sessions offer a special time for you and your child to practice the skills learned while strengthening your bond in a fun and engaging way.
Supporting you to support your child – How to Get Started
Our PCAP training is delivered in-person at Helping Children Smile Again, located in the beautiful town of Belper, Derbyshire, located at
the heart of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site.
What You’ll Receive:
– Full training on the 3 core skills of PCAP.
– A personalized “play kit” guide tailored to your child’s
preferences.
– Practical strategies for managing emotions and behaviour.
– Ongoing support and resources to implement PCAP at home.
Take the Next Step: Book a Free Discovery Call
Ready to explore how PCAP can benefit your family or child in your care?
Book a free 30-minute discovery call with us today. Click on the button below to send me an email and I will be in touch to book a discovery call to talk you through how you can support your child through play.
Interested in becoming a PCAP training setting?
Do you support parents and careers and would like to know more about becoming a Parent Child Attachment Play training setting? If so, I would love to hear from you.
Email me on hello@helpingchildrensmileagain.com to tell me more about your setting.
Testimonials
I've found these days developed specifically for our team by Amanda as invaluable. I feel the work has facilitated me to look at my therapeutic work on a much deeper (subconscious) level and deal with the stress this work presents in a much more conducive way. I feel calm, contained and relaxed after the session, which in turn has led me to be a more thoughtful, productive practitioner and provide a better service for the children and families I work with.
Amanda’s expertise and knowledge has not only given me ideas to assist my practice with clients but has also highlighted the importance of focussing on myself within the work which I am sure has made me a more reflective, centered and aware practitioner. Thank You Amanda!
For me, as the Manager of the team, the sessions Amanda delivered for us have really helped the team to take a step back and to slow down from a busy role that is heavily influenced by social work culture and pressures. The different approaches used in the sessions, which allow creativity, such as drawing and talking or the use of clay, helped tap into the emotional part of ourselves and aided us to express what has been going on for us.
For parents and other adults who are supporting bereaved children, Amanda’s story is a gentle and intuitive way to open up a dialogue about grief. The questions at the back of the book are particularly helpful, providing openings and prompts for those conversations that are so important, but often difficult to begin.
This book is a fabulous tool to help kids cope with the loss of a loved one. The colorful pictures make a topic such as death relatable for children. You can't help but want to give Isaac the biggest hug by the end of the book!
This book is a fabulous tool to help kids cope with the loss of a loved one. The colorful pictures make a topic such as death relatable for children. You can't help but want to give Isaac the biggest hug by the end of the book!
The pictures in the book are powerfully emotive and I bet viewing the artwork for real would be a real treat. Probably the most amazing part of this book is that, despite her fighting for survival she still 'lived' and was always looking for opportunities to enrich her life as well as using her experience to coach others and even working with art as a therapeutic tool and going on to be a practitioner herself. This book was an enjoyable and easy read which was hard to put down.
The terror of feeling that you have emotionally ‘lost’ your child is horrendous. Nothing we read or tried was working and although we understood intellectually why she was the way she was, that didn’t help us to either cope or to move through it. Amanda took the time to allow us to unburden ourselves as parents and there was a lot of that to be done in the beginning! Then she worked with our daughter. We feel that we've made extraordinary progress and cannot thank Amanda enough. I don’t quite understand how the process worked but some kind of magic seemed to happen whilst she played and we are extremely grateful for that.
This is a really simple, quirky and beautifully illustrated story that can be read with a smile. The suggestions for questions an adult could ask at the back of the book are more than helpful. A great book.
This book is brilliant for children who have had a bereavement. I found that the book helped the child to open up and talk about their loss more than anything else I have tried. The characters are interesting and engaging and the illustrations really got the child's attention and interest.
I have found the sessions with Amanda to be thought provoking and have had a positive impact on me as a worker and as an individual. I have gained skills and strategies that I’ve been able to use in my day to day work. The sessions have enabled me to get to know / understand my colleagues on a deeper level, which I feel has brought us all closer together.
This beautifully crafted book is a must read for anyone supporting or parenting a child who has experienced loss. Either through bereavement, divorce or a series of losses as a looked after child, or adoption. As a professional in this field, I particularly liked the case studies, therapeutic stories and ideas of how to help. I’m very often asked for strategies and this book is brimming with them. It really gives the reader a greater insight into the inner world of a grieving child, and the subtle differences between child and adult grief.
I would recommend this training to every practitioner working with loss, the process / experiential elements were exceptionally well held. Amanda had a thoughtful and gentle presence, supportive of the process that unfolded. Amanda was open to really hearing what participants had to say. I felt valued as a participant, and that was important given the sensitivity of the topic, and nature of the experiential creative exercises. It also helped that it was a small group and other participants were equally thoughtful. There was a graciousness to the whole day, that is a rare find. Exceptional.
