A question I get asked a lot, in one form or another: "Why won't they just tell me how they're feeling?"
It's a completely understandable question, and it usually comes from a good place — you want to help, and it's hard to help with something nobody will put into words. But there's a genuinely simple reason behind it, and it's not about a child being difficult or shut off. It's about how the brain is actually built.
Roughly speaking, the brain develops in two parts. The lower part develops first, and it's all about experience — how we physically and emotionally experience the world in real time. The upper part develops later, and that's where language, reasoning, and putting things into words live. In a young child, the connection between those two parts is still forming. It gets stronger as we get older, which is exactly why a teenager or an adult can often say "I feel anxious" in a way a seven-year-old usually can't.
For younger children — and often for neurodivergent children and young people too — that connection between the two parts isn't fully built yet, or doesn't work in quite the same way. So when we ask "how does that make you feel?", we're actually asking them to do something much harder than it sounds: take something they're experiencing in the lower, wordless part of the brain, and translate it into the upper, language part. It's often why the answer you get is "I don't know" or "fine" — not because they won't tell you, but because they genuinely can't find the words for something that isn't stored in words in the first place.
A real example
Say a child has had a burglary happen in their house in the night, and they're now scared to sleep. In traditional counselling, we'd talk through that experience with them. But because the top and bottom parts of the brain aren't fully connected yet, talking about it doesn't actually change the child's experience of it. They're still afraid at night, because the part of them that's afraid was never actually reached by the conversation.
Play works differently, because play is the language a child already speaks fluently. Given the space to play freely, a child will quite naturally let their feelings out — often without even realising they're doing it. They might create a world with a monster that keeps coming back, attacking them, taking the things that matter to them. If I stepped in at that point and said "that's just like when you were burgled," the child would switch straight into the top, language part of the brain to process that comment — and because the two parts aren't well connected yet, that switch actually breaks the thing that was working. The real fear, sitting in the experience-part of the brain, is left untouched.
But if we let the play continue — if the child gets to act out everything they think and feel about that monster, and then gets to decide how they want to respond to it, what they'd like to do about it — something different happens. The child works through that whole scenario for themselves, entirely within their own play. And what the research tells us is that this isn't just "letting off steam" — it actually reshapes the neural pathways involved, so the way they experience something similar in real life (like the thought of something frightening coming into the house at night) genuinely changes.
That's why, for so many children and young people, play — in whatever form it takes — can be the most powerful and effective therapy there is. Not a way of avoiding the hard conversation, but a way of actually having it, in the only language that reaches where the fear really lives.
This way of understanding the brain comes from Dr Dan Siegel and Dr Tina Payne Bryson's well-known "upstairs brain / downstairs brain" model, from their book The Whole-Brain Child — well worth a read if this way of thinking about children's brains is useful to you.