Dr. Shakila Naidu Play therapy or play counselling should be as much a part of the school as are its other activities. While a lot of schools offer counselling to their students, recent research has proved the significance of using play therapy as well in schools. We have now accepted that children learn in different ways and device ways to teach them using play, audio-visuals, and outdoor activities. It is time that we also understood that all children may not respond to a talk only counselling session. This is why play therapy is important in schools. “Deep meaning lies often in childish play”. – Johann Friedrich von Schille The constraints of modern day living have substantially decreased opportunities that children have for exploring, interacting, and playing on their own. The benefits of unstructured play for children are far greater than what is commonly understood. Apart from fostering overall development and learning, play reduces stress, encourages creativity, imagination, and spontaneity while nurturing physical, cognitive, social, and emotional competencies. ‘PLAY‘ an edited book by Shubhada Maitra and Shekhar Seshadri is an excellent compilation of literature and research on play-based innovations in the Indian context. It brings together theory, practice methods and interventions in child development, psycho-social and mental health contexts. With 15 chapters, this book broadly divides into two key sections: theoretical concepts and intervention strategies. The contributors, who are academicians and practitioners, give rich insights into breaking through, healing, and recovery in children who have experienced trauma, violence, death and loss, socio-economic deprivation and sexual abuse in their young lives. The authors, coming from diverse disciplines such as psychology, social work, psychiatry, law and art, create a rich mosaic of ideas and perspectives to cover the entire spectrum of play techniques including art forms such as theatre, dance, music, puppetry, and storytelling. The complexity and lack of consensus in operationally defining play leads to some ambiguity in what constitutes the scope of play. With its myriad dimensions, play has been differently categorized as directive/non-directive, activities organized as unstructured play, creative play or cultural play and interventions grouped as free play/educational play, or therapeutic play. The important distinction that has been made however, is that ‘play has to be freely chosen’ to qualify as play. The chapter on unstructured play and mental health by Lata Shenava is by far the best exposition on the significance of free play. In the current urban scene, children are coerced into structured activities for learning, in the name of play. The