Child and play therapy for families in County Carlow

Carlow sits at the edge of comfortable weekly travel, and we would rather say that plainly than let you find it out in November.

The journey

Carlow town is around forty minutes from Kildare Town. Tullow is roughly the same. Bagenalstown and Muine Bheag are closer to fifty minutes, Borris around an hour.

From Carlow town and the north of the county, weekly in-person therapy works, and plenty of families do it. From the south of the county, an eighty-minute round trip every week for six months or more is a real commitment, and it is worth deciding honestly whether it is one you can sustain. Therapy that gets missed every third week does not do what therapy is supposed to do.

What we offer

Play therapy for younger children, psychotherapy for older children and teenagers, ages 4 to 18. Weekly 50-minute sessions.

Parent and carer work runs alongside, either separately or through our co-working model. For families travelling a distance, some choose to combine a child's session and a parent session in the same trip. That is worth asking about.

Online is a real option here

We offer online sessions for teenagers, and for parents and foster carers who want support of their own. For an older child in south Carlow, that is often what makes weekly work possible rather than theoretical.

Play therapy for younger children is in person only — the room and its materials are the work, and that does not translate to a screen. So for a younger child the drive is unavoidable, and we would rather you weighed that up now than in November.

​For professionals in Carlow

We take referrals from Tusla social workers, GPs, schools and SENOs, and we work with fostering agencies and residential services.

For a residential team or a group of foster carers in the county, training and consultation is often more useful than individual therapy for one child, and distance matters less for a block of training than it does for weekly sessions.

Get in touch

Ring 085 711 5668 or email contact@safesteps.ie. No referral needed, and we will tell you honestly if we think the travel will not work.

Abbey House, White Abbey Road, Kildare Town, Co. Kildare, R51 A589.

Where we work: Kildare · Laois · Kilkenny · Offaly · Dublin · Wicklow · Mullingar and Westmeath · Online sessions