by Kylie Ellison
Hosted by therapist and trainer Kylie Ellison, this podcast explores the heart of Child-Centred Play Therapy and the healing power of play. Each episode offers thoughtful reflections and practical insights for play therapists, students, and caregivers supporting children’s emotional wellbeing. ✨ Join the community: https://mailchi.mp/playtherapycircle.com/play-therapy-circle ✨ Podcast subscriptions: https://kylieellison.com.au/ptcsub
Language
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Publishing Since
7/17/2025
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May 28, 2026
<p><strong>Back to Basics: Tracking Plus Your Questions | EP43</strong></p><p>This episode marks something new. Listener questions, answered on the show. And the question that came in was so good, it deserved real time and real depth.</p><p>But first: a back-to-basics teaching segment on <strong>tracking</strong> — one of the very first skills we learn in Child-Centred Play Therapy, and one of the most quietly powerful. What it sounds like, why it matters, and the common mistakes that are easy to make without realising.</p><p>Tracking is the skill of verbally following and reflecting a child's play and behaviour without leading, interpreting, or directing. It sounds simple. But done well, it communicates something profound: I am fully present with you, and what you are doing matters. It builds the relationship, honours the child's autonomy, and is unconditional positive regard in action.</p><p>Kylie walks through what tracking looks like in practice, the crucial difference between tracking the action and interpreting the meaning, and the most common mistakes new practitioners make including over-tracking, labelling, and questions disguised as tracking.</p><p>Then, your question:</p><p><strong>Terri from Ireland</strong> asks about children who people-please, control, or go silent in the playroom directed toward the therapist. Through the lens of Lipton's developmental theory, Kylie explores these behaviours as relational templates formed in the earliest years and now being replayed in the playroom. Each one is an adapted survival strategy. Each one points to an unmet need.</p><p>Kylie unpacks all three with practical examples of how to respond, and when to move from simple reflection into enlargement and deeper reflective responding. She also addresses Terri's instinct about timing: that going too deep too early, before trust is established, can feel intrusive or even unsafe for the child. That instinct is exactly right.</p><p>The principle that ties it all together: reflection follows relationship. The depth of our responding should never outpace the depth of trust we have built.</p><p>Oh, and a milestone worth celebrating. The Play Therapy Circle Podcast is now reaching listeners in <strong>70 countries</strong>. A genuine moment of gratitude for a community that continues to grow.</p><p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p><ul><li>What tracking is, what it sounds like, and why it matters</li><li>The difference between tracking and interpreting, and why that distinction is crucial</li><li>Common tracking mistakes and how to avoid them</li><li>People-pleasing, controlling, and silence as relational templates and unmet needs</li><li>Practical examples of reflective responding and enlargement for each behaviour</li><li>Why timing matters: when enlargement helps and when it can harm</li><li>Reflection follows relationship: the principle that guides it all</li><li>A celebration of 70 countries and the global Play Therapy Circle community</li></ul><p>Have a question you'd love answered on the show? Send it in via hello@playtherapycircle.com or find Kylie on Instagram @Playtherapycirclepodcast or @kylieellisontherapy.</p><p><br></p><p>Join our free Community Circle - <a href="https://members.kylieellison.com.au/plans/1968235?bundle_token=b3420d5fd970f068b7acac704ede80b7&utm_source=manual">Tier One - The Community Circle</a></p><p></p>
May 21, 2026
<p><strong>Revisited: The Pandemic Ripple Effect</strong></p><p>This week, we're reaching back into The Play Therapy Circle archives to revisit a conversation that continues to resonate and perhaps now, more than ever, feels urgently relevant.</p><p>The Pandemic Ripple Effect.</p><p>If you are working with children aged 4–6 years old right now, whether as a play therapist, counsellor, early childhood educator, teacher, parent or carer, there is a very good chance you are noticing something. A rise in anxiety. More tears at drop-off. Children who seem younger than their age in some ways, or who struggle in social situations that might have once felt unremarkable. Big feelings that seem to arrive without warning, and separation distress that can feel confusing or even alarming to the adults around them.</p><p>You are not imagining it.</p><p>In this episode, Kylie explores what is increasingly being observed in clinical practice and supported by emerging research: that for many children in this age group, the earliest and most foundational years of their development unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those years, the ones that shape so much of who a child becomes, looked very different for this cohort. Routines that provide safety and predictability were disrupted or disappeared entirely. Playgroups, childcare and early learning environments closed or changed. Opportunities for peer connection, social rehearsal and play-based learning were significantly reduced. And all of this happened while many families were simultaneously navigating their own experiences of stress, grief, financial pressure, uncertainty and isolation.</p><p>Children are exquisitely sensitive to the emotional climate around them. They absorb far more than we realise.</p><p>Now, as this cohort moves into kindergarten, prep and the early years of primary school, those early experiences are showing up, in school readiness challenges, in emotional regulation, in separation anxiety at the gate, in social confidence, in transitions, and in the volume and intensity of big feelings that can catch everyone off guard.</p><p>Kylie gently and thoughtfully unpacks what we know, drawing on Australian and global data, emerging research, and her own clinical experience, to help us understand this generation not through a lens of deficit or alarm, but through one of context, compassion and genuine curiosity.</p><p>This conversation is not about blame. It is not about catastrophising. It is about helping the adults in these children's lives to understand what they are seeing, to feel validated in their observations, and to know that there is a path forward.</p><p>Kylie also explores how Child-Centered Play Therapy can offer children in this cohort something profoundly important: a safe, consistent, developmentally appropriate relationship and space in which to process their experiences, practise mastery and competence, build internal safety, strengthen emotional expression and experience the kind of warm, attuned co-regulation that helps a nervous system learn that the world is okay.</p><p>Play therapy does not require children to have the words. It meets them exactly where they are.</p><p>For parents and caregivers, this episode is an invitation to exhale. What you are experiencing with your child is real. The challenges are real. And they make sense when we understand the context in which your child's earliest years took place. With the right support, connection, understanding and time, children are remarkably resilient — and they can absolutely be helped to feel safer, more settled, more confident and more ready to engage with the world around them.</p><p>For therapists and educators, this episode is a reminder of why the work you do matters so deeply right now and why meeting this cohort with patience and perspective is one of the most powerful things you can offer.</p><p>Because, as always, play is the way.</p><p>New to The Play Therapy Circle? Start here, and then explore Kylie's training programs at playtherapytrainingaustralia.com.au</p><p></p>
May 14, 2026
<p>Kylie dives deep into the science behind the COVID generation - what the research is now telling us about children born between 2019 and 2022, why so many kids are struggling right now, and why that is absolutely not a reflection of your parenting. From maternal prenatal stress tripling during the pandemic, to MRI findings showing differences in brain development, to the speech delays, separation anxiety, and social-emotional gaps we're seeing play out in classrooms and therapy rooms across the country - the data is real, and so is the grace that comes with understanding it.</p><p>She also unpacks why traditional behaviour strategies like sticker charts and reward systems aren't the answer for this generation of kids, and what children actually need right now: consistency, predictability, and repeated co-regulation with a calm adult over time. Not a quick fix. Not a perfect parent. You.</p><p>She also takes on the myth of the Instagram parent - that curated, polished, cropped-out-the-chaos version of family life that has so many of us silently measuring ourselves against an impossible standard - and gives you full, unapologetic permission to put it down.</p><p>Drawing on the work of Donald Winnicott and his concept of the good enough parent, Kylie reminds us that children don't need perfection. They need someone who gets it right most of the time, apologises when they don't, and stays in the relationship even when it's hard. That's it. That's the work.</p><p>This episode is for the parents. It's for the practitioners sitting with exhausted families every day. And it's for anyone who needs to hear that the fact that you're still showing up - still trying, still caring - means you are already doing more than enough.</p><p>Come as you are. You belong here.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Kylie Ellison </strong>is a Counsellor and Registered Play Therapist Supervisor who has been working in CCPT for over a decade. Her vision is to see a community of play therapists supporting and encouraging each other. </p><p>Join the circle for FREE - Community Circle - <a href="https://kylieellison.com.au/ptcsubs/">Circle Subscriptions - Kylie Ellison Therapy & Training</a></p><p>•Ching, B. C. F., Parlatini, V., Zhang, S., et al. (2024). Impact of the Covid pandemic on the mental health of children and young people with pre-existing mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions: a systematic review andmeta-analysis. European Psychiatry.•Hossain, M. M., et al. (2022). Long-term physical, mental and social health effects of COVID-19 in the paediatric population: a scoping review. Italian Journal of Pediatrics.•Panchal, U., Salazar de Pablo, G., Franco, M., et al. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on child and adolescent mental health: systematic review. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.•Stefanatou, P., et al. (2023). Play as a stress-coping method among children in light of the COVID-19 pandemic: a review. Cureus.•Vasileva, M., Alisic, E., & De Young, A. (2021). COVID-19 unmasked: preschool children's negative thoughts and worries during the COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Psychotraumatology.•Hashempour, N., et al. (2024). Prenatal maternal psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and newborn brain development. JAMA Network Open, 7(6).•Manning, K. Y., Long, X., Watts, D., et al. (2022). Prenatal maternal distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and associations with infant brain connectivity. Biological Psychiatry.•Lu, Y.-C., Andescavage, N., Wu, Y., et al. (2022). Impact of COVID-19 related maternal stress on fetal brain development: a multimodal MRI study. Communications Medicine.•Landreth, G. L. (2023). Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship (4th ed.). Routledge.•Association for Play Therapy. (2024). Evidence base for play therapy. www.a4pt.org</p>
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Hosted by therapist and trainer Kylie Ellison, this podcast explores the heart of Child-Centred Play Therapy and the healing power of play. Each episode offers thoughtful reflections and practical insights for play therapists, students, and caregivers supporting children’s emotional wellbeing.
✨ Join the community: https://mailchi.mp/playtherapycircle.com/play-therapy-circle ✨ Podcast subscriptions: https://kylieellison.com.au/ptcsub
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