Picture this: a three-year-old is crawling around the loungeroom floor pretending to be a dog, a therapist is barking back, and somewhere in the middle of all this there's an invoice being generated. It's fair to wonder whether any actual therapy is going on. The answer is yes — and play is doing far more of the heavy lifting than it looks.
For young children, play isn't a break from learning — it is learning. It's how they explore the world, test out ideas, build relationships, and develop the communication skills they need to connect with the people around them. And for speech pathologists, play is one of the most powerful tools we have.
Why Play Is the Primary Vehicle for Learning
Young children learn best when they're engaged, motivated, and having fun. That's not just common sense — it's backed by decades of developmental research.
Play allows children to:
- Explore language naturally — naming objects, describing actions, requesting, commenting, and storytelling all happen spontaneously during play
- Practise social skills — turn-taking, sharing, negotiating, and reading other people's reactions
- Develop thinking skills — problem-solving, predicting, sequencing, and imagining
- Build emotional regulation — managing frustration, coping with losing a game, and expressing feelings
When children are playing, they're in a state of readiness to learn. They're relaxed, curious, and intrinsically motivated. Compare that to sitting at a table doing worksheets — for most young children, the play-based approach wins every time.
The Play-Language Connection
There's a well-established relationship between play development and language development. Children's play and language tend to develop along parallel paths — and when one is delayed, the other often is too.
Carol Westby's research on play-language connections, first published in the 1980s and still widely referenced today, showed that a child's level of symbolic play (pretend play) closely mirrors their level of language development (Westby, 2000). For example:
- A child who is just starting to use single words in speech tends to be at the stage of simple pretend play (like pretending to drink from an empty cup)
- A child who is combining words into short sentences is usually engaging in more complex pretend play (like feeding a doll and putting it to bed)
- A child who can tell a story with a clear sequence is typically engaging in elaborate, multi-step pretend scenarios
This connection means that speech pathologists can both assess and support language development through play. If we understand where a child is in their play development, we have a clear window into their language abilities — and a roadmap for what to target next.
How Speech Pathologists Use Play Purposefully
When a speech pathologist plays with a child, every element of that play has been chosen for a reason. What looks like casual fun is actually a carefully structured interaction designed to create opportunities for communication.
Here's what's going on behind the scenes:
Choosing the Right Activity
The speech pathologist selects activities that are likely to elicit the specific language or communication targets the child is working on. Building with blocks? That's great for action words (build, push, fall down), requesting (more, please, my turn), and descriptive language (big, tall, red). Playing shops? Perfect for social language, questions, sequencing, and vocabulary.
Engineering Communication Opportunities
Rather than just playing alongside the child, the speech pathologist sets up situations where the child needs to communicate. That might look like a favourite toy just out of reach, "forgetting" a step in a familiar routine to see if the child notices, or playing the "wrong" way to invite the child to correct and direct. Each of these moves is a small clinical decision — when to try it, when to wait, when to let the moment pass.
Following the Child's Lead (Most of the Time)
Good play-based therapy usually starts with the child's interests — dinosaurs, water play, trucks, whatever lights them up that day. But "following the lead" isn't the whole story. When and why a therapist follows versus gently steers is a bigger topic in its own right, which we unpack in Child-Led vs Clinician-Led Therapy.
Modelling Language
During play, the speech pathologist constantly models the language they want the child to learn, expanding on the child's words and using the sentence structures they're working towards. This happens naturally within the flow of play, not as a drill or a test. You can see exactly what this looks like turn-by-turn in our companion article on play in sessions.
The Difference Between "Just Playing" and Therapeutic Play
This is a question parents sometimes ask — and it's a fair one. If the child is just playing, why do they need a speech pathologist?
The difference lies in the intentionality. A speech pathologist playing with a child is making constant decisions in the background — setting specific goals for what to practise that session, choosing activities that will naturally create opportunities for those goals, and scaffolding (providing just enough help for the child to succeed, then gradually pulling back as their skills grow). All while tracking what's working and what needs to change.
Compare that to free play at home, where the focus is on fun, bonding, and exploration (which is also incredibly valuable, by the way!). In therapy, play is purposeful — it has a destination, even if the journey looks like fun and games. Play-based therapy is the approach I lean on most, because I've watched the same children who shut down at a table come alive on the floor with a basket of dinosaurs.
Play Assessment: Understanding Your Child Through Play
Speech pathologists also use play as an assessment tool. By observing how a child plays — what types of play they engage in, how complex their pretend play is, how they interact with toys and people — we can learn a great deal about their language, cognitive, and social development.
Lifter and colleagues have written extensively about using play assessment and intervention in speech pathology, highlighting that play observation can reveal a child's symbolic thinking abilities, creativity, and readiness for different types of language targets (Lifter et al., 2011).
This is particularly valuable for children who may not perform well in formal, structured assessments. Watching a child play in a comfortable, familiar context often gives us a much truer picture of what they can do.
Play and Early Intervention
Best-practice guidance for early intervention emphasises the importance of intervening early, within natural environments, and using developmentally appropriate approaches. For young children, that means play — meeting them where they are, building on their natural interests, involving parents as active participants, and creating a positive association with therapy from the start.
Children who enjoy therapy sessions are more engaged, more willing to try new things, and more likely to practise at home — all of which lead to better outcomes. As a mum of two young boys, I see the power of play every single day — kids learn best when they're laughing and having fun, and the children we work with are no different.
Play Is Not a Lesser Approach
Sometimes parents worry that play-based therapy isn't "real" therapy — that their child should be sitting at a table doing structured drills. For some older children and some specific goals, structured practice has its place. But for young children, play-based therapy isn't a soft option. It's the evidence-based option.
Children learn language by using it in meaningful, motivating contexts. Play provides exactly that. When a child requests "more bubbles" during a bubble game, that's real communication. When they narrate a story about their toy animals going on an adventure, that's real language. And when they take turns, share, and negotiate during a game with a peer, that's real social learning.
Play is at the heart of what we do with young children. If you've been wondering what happens in a therapy session — or why your child seems to be "just playing" — we hope this helps explain the method behind the fun. Speaking Speech Pathology offers mobile speech pathology in your home across Brisbane's south side and Logan, where real play happens naturally. If you'd like to know more, we'd love to chat.
Ready for practical strategies? Read our companion article: How Speech Pathologists Use Play in Therapy Sessions | Brisbane
Alexandra Bouwmeester is a Hanen-certified Senior Speech Pathologist (MSPA, CPSP) and mum of two young boys. She offers mobile speech pathology to families across Brisbane's south side and Logan.
References
- Lifter, K., Foster-Sanda, S., Arzamarski, C., Briesch, J., & McClure, E. (2011). Overview of play: Its uses and importance in early intervention/early childhood special education. Infants & Young Children, 24(3), 225–245.
- Roberts, M. Y., & Kaiser, A. P. (2011). The effectiveness of parent-implemented language interventions: A meta-analysis. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20(3), 180–199.
- Westby, C. E. (2000). A scale for assessing development of children's play. In K. Gitlin-Weiner, A. Sandgrund, & C. Schaefer (Eds.), Play Diagnosis and Assessment (2nd ed., pp. 15–57). John Wiley & Sons.
