What Can Play Therapy Offer Immigrant Children?

A family carries luggage on a pink and green spiral background.

Source: Designed by the author.

Children in the U.S. who are immigrants or first-generation immigrants face specific challenges that can add stress to an already fraught socio-political climate. Due to political campaigns driving hate toward immigrants, children have to manage seeing their ethnic group bashed in the media.

A play therapist can offer a space for children who are confused about a number of issues: the reasons they left their homes, the way things are in their new home, family secrets about being undocumented, many transitions and changes in their lives, and intergenerational assimilation challenges in families. Awareness of the variations in an immigrant’s experiences is the first step to being able to offer safe spaces for immigrant families in play therapy.

Beyond anti-immigrant sentiments, the experience of immigration can have a lot of implications for different groups and identities. Immigrants move to a new country for an unnameable number of reasons, including new opportunities, to be closer to family, or to escape more challenging situations, like fleeing violence in the origin country. Immigration does not only consist of the time spent in the new country; rather, it begins with the factors that cause a person to consider leaving the country of origin. Was the family safe and healthy or in fear and distress?

Then comes the process of leaving—is it simple and easy to get documentation to enter the new country? Or is the immigrant group stigmatized and experiencing difficulties in obtaining paperwork? What is the access to safe travel to the new country? Is it as simple as booking flights and packing up? Or is it running away and taking multiple modes of transportation and walking on foot and hiding or other arduous and traumatic experiences? Families enter our schools or play therapy programs with these journeys and can struggle to acclimate to the second or third country into which they are trying to settle.

Children who are unauthorized or undocumented face fears of being deported, living in the shadows, and the inability to participate in some activities, like out-of-country class trips or access to financial aid. I’ve had children coming to school who were “afraid of what I heard on the news—that Muslims will be banned. Does this mean my dad will be deported?”

Another one of the many issues is the differing speeds at which family members engage in assimilation. Usually, children are quick to assimilate because they are in school and are making adjustments in their identity formation. Adults can take longer, but sometimes, they are hopeful to rid themselves of their ethnic identity in hopes of conforming to the dominant society quicker, perhaps to access a higher level of privilege.

So, what does play therapy offer a child who has immigrated or who has immigrant parents?

A registered play therapist can create a safer space for the child, honoring the culture they have left behind, validating their wishes to assimilate or not, providing a healthy relationship with an adult, and identifying strategies to manage their stresses.

Play therapists can define terms like deportation, create connections to characters in books who have had to leave their homes, and show interest in the languages the child knows. A non-directive play therapist can track the child’s emotions in their play and offer a healthy adult relationship for the child who has had little control in their lives to be in the driver’s seat of their play therapy time (Fils-Aime, 2024).