I’m happy to share a great new resource for parents and kids in my latest business visit! Yanna Noboa, a Clinical Child Therapist recently took me on a tour of her new space: The Healing Nest Play Therapy Center, located in the Cummings Center, in Beverly.
Yanna is a Salem native, who currently lives in Peabody. She attended Salem State for her undergraduate degree and later Boston College for graduate school, plus worked for 8 years in Boston-area hospitals. As her skills and experience grew, she saw an unmet need for play therapy and services on the North Shore and was excited to bring her new business to the community.
At The Healing Nest Play Therapy Center, Yanna provides play therapy for kids experiencing emotional or behavioral challenges. She also provides parent consults and supervision for professionals seeking clinical hours in social work.
Yanna is a certified child-centered play therapist and works exclusively with children ages 3-10 years old. She explains that child-centered play therapy is the most developmentally appropriate therapeutic intervention for this age group. Per Yanna, children naturally communicate and express themselves through play. Unlike adults, who use verbal communication to express their thoughts and emotions, children often use play as their primary means of expression (Landreth, 2012). Play allows children to symbolically represent their experiences, making it easier for them to express complex emotions and thoughts that they may not have the verbal capacity to articulate (Ray, 2011).
Her Center includes a comfortable waiting area for parents (stocked with coffee), a welcoming meeting room, and a large, sunny playroom filled with toys and games that help support kids to reach the four universal outcomes of play therapy: increased self-esteem, self-regulation, worldview and emotional skills.
Most of the toys in the playroom encourage hands-on activities and each 45-minute session is child-led. If your child is having difficulty with anxiety, self-esteem, or with back-to-school coming–challenges related to separation anxiety or school behaviors, Yanna can help.
Parents can find more on Yanna’s child-centered play based therapies at thehealingnestplaytherapy.com. Initial consults are free and can help you determine if play therapy is right for your child. For every 5 sessions a child meets with Yanna, the parents will also have 1 session to review progress and the skills being learned, so they can practice them at home as a family.
Yanna hopes that North Shore parents will see The Healing Nest Play Therapy Center as a source of information and support. She is always happy to talk with parents and is bilingual and can offer all services in Spanish as well.
Find The Healing Nest online at thehealingnestplaytherapy.com, on Instagram @thehealingnest__ and on Facebook at The Healing Nest Play Therapy Center LLC.
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This post is sponsored by The Healing Nest Play Therapy, but all opinions present are my own.