Symbolic Play

When a child picks up a toy figure and makes it speak, or turns a cardboard box into a spaceship, they are doing far more than pretending. They are thinking. They are processing. They are making sense of their world.

Symbolic play — the ability to use one object or action to represent something else — is one of the most significant capacities a child develops. As Jean Piaget observed, it serves as a bridge between concrete experience and abstract thought. A child cannot yet reason in the abstract, but they can hold a toy bear and work through something that happened to them. The bear becomes the bridge.

Why symbolic play matters

Children live in the present and the concrete. When something happens that is confusing, overwhelming, or frightening — whether experienced directly or indirectly — they do not have the cognitive or verbal tools to process it the way adults might. What they have is play.

As Landreth describes in Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship, play gives concrete form and expression to children’s inner worlds. Through symbolic play, children are able to reorganise their experiences, and in doing so, feel a sense of control and security that may be unavailable to them in real life. An experience that feels unmanageable in reality can be approached safely through symbolic representation.

Crucially, the child is not always consciously aware of what they are doing. They are not sitting down and deciding to “process their trauma through play.” They are simply playing. And it is precisely this distance — the fact that it is the bear, not them; the figure, not their parent — that makes the experience safe enough to return to again and again.

Repetition as resolution

It is common for children to return repeatedly to the same themes in play. A child who has experienced something frightening may re-enact it many times over. This is not cause for concern — it is the process working. By revisiting the experience symbolically, the child gradually moves toward an inner resolution. They are in control of the story. They can change the ending. The unfamiliar becomes familiar.

This is also true of experiences the child does not yet understand — things that are abstract, future-oriented, or simply beyond their current comprehension. When a child plays out what they cannot grasp, they are working to make meaning of it.

Play is how children think through the things they cannot yet think about.

Reference

Landreth, G. L. (2012). Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship (4th ed.). Routledge. Drawing also on Piaget, J. (1962). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Norton.