Play therapy in Vaughan, for children who show you before they can tell you
A child who has had a hard week does not sit down and describe it. She pushes a horse into the sand, buries it, digs it out, and does the same thing again next Tuesday. Play therapy in Vaughan works with the language a child already has, so a five year old is not asked to find words that belong to an adult.
No referral needed · in-person or online · with Registered Psychotherapists.
Psychotherapists
supervision
for young children
20 minutes
Clinically reviewed by Svetlana Antonyshyn, Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #001652). Last reviewed August 2026.
What is play therapy in Vaughan, and what happens in a session?
Play therapy is counselling for children roughly ages 3 to 11 that uses sand, figures, drawing and story instead of conversation. The therapist reflects what the child does, holds a few steady limits, and coaches parents in the same skills. At InnerSight it runs in person at the Woodbridge office or online across Ontario, $180 for 55 minutes.
A child chooses what to do for 55 minutes. There is sand, there are small figures, there is paper, there are puppets, and usually a story that changes shape halfway through. Your therapist says out loud what they see, without praising it, correcting it, or asking where it is going. A child who buries a figure and digs it out again, week after week, is working on something, and being watched doing it by an adult who does not interfere is most of the mechanism.
Before roughly age eleven, a child does not have the vocabulary or the distance to report on an internal state on request. Ask a six year old why she hit her brother and the honest answer is that she does not know. Behaviour is the report. What looks like defiance at 4pm is often a child at the end of a capacity that ran out three hours earlier at school, and play is where that becomes visible in a form an adult can work with.
Parents tend to notice the change outside the room first. The recovery time after a meltdown shortens before the number of meltdowns drops. A child names one feeling at bedtime who used to go silent. Mornings stop starting from a deficit. That is the order it usually arrives in, and it is worth knowing in advance so the first few weeks do not read as nothing happening.
Two honest things belong here, and the first is a choice you get to make. Keera Anton and Chantal Ruzsa see children in person at the Woodbridge office, where the playroom and its materials are already set up and a child gets a room that is not their own bedroom. Elnaz Bayandor works online across Ontario, which suits parent coached play, drawing, storytelling, puppets and a sandtray built at home from your own things, and which removes the drive, the waiting room and the lost school afternoon. Neither format is the better one in general. For a child under about four who cannot stay with a screen, or for a family without a private space and a steady connection, in person is the sensible call. For a family an hour from Woodbridge with a school run to work around, online is. The second thing is a limit rather than a choice. Play therapy is the wrong first step when a developmental or learning difference is suspected. That starts with an assessment through your family doctor, since Registered Psychotherapists do not diagnose or prescribe.
Who would run my child's play therapy sessions?
Three of our Registered Psychotherapists are trained in play therapy. Keera Anton (CRPO 18896) and Chantal Ruzsa (CRPO 20606) both see children in person at the Woodbridge office. Elnaz Bayandor (CRPO 13225) works online across Ontario, in English and Farsi, so a Farsi speaking parent can be coached in the language they actually parent in, which matters when the coaching is live and there is no time to translate.
None of the three holds the Registered Play Therapist designation from the Association for Play Therapy, and we will not imply otherwise. In Ontario that designation is not required in order to practise play therapy. Appropriate training and demonstrated competence are what is required, and that is what these three have. If none of their availability suits your family, the child and youth therapy page sets out the other options and the rest of the team.
Elnaz Bayandor
Keera Anton
Chantal Ruzsa
What a play therapist would say instead
Four moments that happen in most living rooms. The first response is the reflex one, the one nearly every parent gives, including therapists at home with their own children. Open each card for the response a play therapist would use, and why the small difference changes what the child does next.
Your child scowls at the picture, pushes it across the table and says it is stupid. You say, "Do not be upset, it looks great."
Reflect what you see and leave the feeling where it is. "You did not like how that one turned out. You are really frustrated with it." Arguing with a feeling teaches a child the feeling was wrong, so the child argues back harder to prove it was not. Named accurately, most of these settle within a minute or two on their own.
What play therapy helps children work through
Your child holds everything together all day at school, then falls apart the moment the front door closes behind them. Play gives the feeling somewhere to go before it becomes a slammed door, a bitten sibling or an hour of shouting.
A parent moved out, a grandparent died, or the family moved cities, and your child has said almost nothing about any of it. Children work a change through in the doll house or the sandtray long before they can put it into a sentence.
You ask what is wrong and get a shrug, every time, and it is not evasion. The vocabulary for what is happening inside a seven year old is often not built yet, and play therapy removes the requirement to explain.
There is a stomach ache every school morning that lifts by Saturday, or bedtime takes ninety minutes and four trips back downstairs. Anxious children usually show it in the body and the bedtime routine well before they show it in words.
A car accident, a hospital stay, a dog that bit, or something the family has decided not to discuss. Children replay frightening events in play over and over, and a therapist can help that replay move toward an ending the child can live with.
Your child wants friends and keeps ending up on the edge of the group, or the same conflict arrives every few weeks with a different classmate. Play is a low stakes place to practise sharing, losing, and repairing things afterwards.
Every interaction has turned into a negotiation, and you have noticed you are correcting far more than you are enjoying. A large part of this work is coaching you in a different way of responding, which is often what shifts the pattern at home.
Does play therapy actually work, or is it supervised playtime with a bill attached?
Play therapy is better evidenced than most people assume. Nearly a hundred controlled studies, effects that shrink but hold under stricter conditions, and the strongest results of all where parents are coached directly rather than the child being seen alone.
of young children whose parents were coached through play over video showed clinically significant improvement, against 42 percent referred to the usual local services.
standard deviations of improvement across 93 controlled studies, compared with children who received nothing. The approaches that involved parents directly produced the largest effects of all.
Bratton, Ray, Rhine & Jones, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 2005
randomised trials of child centred play therapy running in schools. The benefits held up but were smaller: 0.34 for outwardly visible behaviour, 0.21 for inward struggles such as worry.
Ray, Armstrong, Balkin & Jayne, Psychology in the Schools (via ERIC record EJ1049577), 2015
children referred for disruptive behaviour, median age six. Child centred play therapy produced a moderate improvement of 0.48 against a waitlist or another treatment.
Parker, Hergenrather, Smelser & Kelly, International Journal of Play Therapy, 2021
of children aged three to five responded when their families were coached through play by video, against 55 percent who attended the same programme in person.
A small trial, 40 children.
How does play therapy in Vaughan start, and what do the first weeks look like?
Your child is asked to do nothing in week one, and neither are you beyond describing what the hard part of the day actually looks like.
Play therapy has a real evidence base, and the honest reading of it is that the effects are useful rather than dramatic. The often quoted figure of 0.80 comes from a pooled analysis reaching back to 1953, using study designs that would not survive review today.
A free 20 minute consultation, without your child in the room
The first conversation is with you. What is happening at home, what school has said, what you have already tried, and whether in person at Woodbridge or online over video suits your family better. It costs nothing. It is also where you will be told if a paediatric assessment should come first, which is a conversation worth having before any money changes hands.
A parent session, then the first play sessions
Your therapist meets with you before meeting your child, so your child does not spend the first session listening to their own history being recited. After that, sessions run 55 minutes at $180. Early on a child is mostly testing the rules: whether the sand can leave the tray, whether an adult will get irritated, whether anything they build will be taken away and explained back to them.
What shifts first, and where you will see it
Your therapist will ask you every few weeks what has changed with sleep, with mornings, and with how long it takes your child to come back after a hard moment. Those are the honest markers. If nothing has moved after a fair stretch, that is a reason to change approach or to look at a different kind of support, and they will raise it rather than wait for you to.
What does a play therapist actually do while a child plays?
Your therapist narrates what the child is doing and stops there. You moved him behind the wall. You decided that one goes on top. Praise turns play into performance, and a child who is being praised starts producing what pleases the adult. Neutral tracking keeps the play the child's own, which is the only reason anything honest turns up in it.
For younger children the strongest results come from coaching a parent through play in real time rather than working with the child alone. That happens either in the Woodbridge playroom or in your own front room over video, with your therapist watching and telling you what to say and when to hold a limit. The trials behind that finding were run both in clinics and through a parent’s own home, which is part of why either format is a fair choice here.
In person there is a tray, sand and a shelf of small figures already waiting. For online sessions you gather a shallow tray, sand or rice, a handful of small figures, paper and markers before the first appointment. A child arranging their own kitchen shelf into a world is doing the same thing a clinic sandtray does. It does mean your kitchen becomes part of the therapy, which some families find useful and some find intrusive, and that is a fair thing to raise at the consultation.
A limit that holds has three moves: name the feeling, state the limit plainly once, offer somewhere for the impulse to go. You are angry with your sister. People are not for hitting. You can hit the cushion. Parents are taught this directly, because a skill used four times a week at home does more work than one used once a week in a session.
What therapy costs in Vaughan
No hidden fees. Most private insurance plans cover a portion of psychotherapy fees.
A conversation with you as the parent first. Tell us what you are seeing at home, and ask anything.
Most private insurance plans cover a portion of psychotherapy with a Registered Psychotherapist.
Longer sessions when the work involves parents and siblings together. First family appointment runs 90 minutes.
Reduced-fee sessions from $125 are available with select supervised therapists in training through our affordable therapy program.
Your questions, answered
What is play therapy, and how does it actually work?
A child gets a set of materials, 55 minutes in which nothing is demanded of them, and a therapist who says out loud what they see without correcting it. What emerges is rarely a story about the actual problem. It is a pattern: the same figure keeps getting rescued, the same scene keeps getting knocked down and rebuilt. Being witnessed doing that repeatedly, by an adult who neither flinches nor fixes it, is what moves things. Parents are taught the same way of responding to use at home between sessions.
What age is play therapy for, and is my child too old for it?
Roughly ages three to eleven, and the fit follows developmental stage rather than birthday. A verbal, self aware nine year old may do better with talking work. A twelve year old who still shows you rather than tells you can still do well with sand and drawing. Past about eleven most children move toward talk based therapy, and our child and youth therapy page covers that range up to seventeen. Under about four, in person tends to hold a child better than video does, and parent coaching becomes the sensible route either way.
What is the difference between play therapy and CBT for children?
CBT works from the outside in. A child learns to catch a thought, test it against evidence, and choose a different response, which requires enough language and enough distance from the feeling to manage it. That capacity arrives for most children somewhere in the later primary years. Play therapy requires neither. In practice the two overlap: an eight year old may do play based work that gradually includes naming feelings and rehearsing what to do with them, which is cognitive work in a form a child will accept.
Is it play therapy or occupational therapy that my child needs?
Occupational therapy works on how a child manages the physical world: handwriting, coordination, dressing, feeding, sensory input that is too much or not enough. Play therapy works on what a child feels and how that comes out in behaviour. The two get confused because a child overwhelmed by noise and a child overwhelmed by worry can look identical at 4pm on a Tuesday. If the pattern tracks with textures, sounds, movement or motor tasks, ask your family doctor about an occupational therapy referral first. Plenty of children see both.
Does play therapy work over video, or does my child need to be in a playroom?
We offer both, so this is a choice rather than a constraint. Keera Anton and Chantal Ruzsa work in person at the Woodbridge office, and Elnaz Bayandor works online across Ontario. The evidence for video is stronger than most parents expect. In a randomised trial of 40 children aged three to five, 70 percent of those coached through play by video responded to treatment, compared with 55 percent who attended the same programme in person at a clinic. A larger trial of 150 very young children found 74 percent improved with video coaching against 42 percent referred to usual services. What video cannot give you is a dedicated playroom and a therapist physically present, which is why we kept both.
How many play therapy sessions does a child usually need?
There is no set number, and any clinic that quotes one before meeting your child is guessing. Sessions are usually weekly at the start. The more useful question is what gets reviewed and how often: your therapist will ask every few weeks what has shifted with sleep, mornings, school and how long it takes your child to settle after a hard moment. If nothing has moved after a fair stretch, that is a reason to change approach rather than to book another block of the same thing.
Do parents sit in on play therapy sessions, or wait outside?
Both happen, and the format changes the question a little. In child led sessions a parent settles the child in and then steps back, whether that means the waiting area at Woodbridge or moving out of the camera frame at home, so the child is not performing for two audiences at once. In parent coached work you are in it the whole time, playing with your child while your therapist talks you through what to say. Either way there is a regular parent conversation about what they are seeing and what to try at home, without repeating your child’s private material back to you word for word.
Is play therapy just playing, or is something clinical happening?
Something clinical is happening, and from the doorway it looks unremarkable. The therapist is tracking themes across weeks, noting what gets repeated and what gets carefully avoided, holding a small number of limits consistently, and choosing when to reflect a feeling and when to stay quiet. The restraint is the skill. An adult who asks questions, suggests a better ending, or compliments the drawing turns the session into a task, and the child will then produce what the adult appears to want instead of what is going on.
Where to see us in person, or meet online
Three offices across Vaughan and Barrie, plus secure video sessions anywhere in Ontario. Evenings and weekends available.
Three steps, starting today
Book your free consult
Online in 2 minutes or by phone. No referral, no credit card.
Meet your therapist
Talk it through and get matched with the right fit for you.
Watch it land at home
You get practical coaching too, so what happens in session shows up at the dinner table.