Built for one shared screen
Every game runs in the browser, needs no printing, and takes under ten minutes — so the session stays about the young person, not the setup.
Little Lantern is a set of 18 interactive games that help a therapist open a difficult conversation with a child or teenager. The games draw on cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy and trauma-informed practice, and each one turns an idea that is hard to talk about into something a young person can point at, move or play with. You share your screen, they lead, and the conversation usually follows.
It is built for the people who sit with children for a living: therapists and counsellors in private practice, school counsellors and pastoral teams, social workers, and the parents or carers who are doing therapeutic work at home between appointments. The games are pitched at roughly ages 6 to 17, and the free practice link is designed to be handed straight to a family — it opens on the device already in the room, with no account and no sign-in.
Little Lantern is an independent project, built by a small team of designers and software engineers who work alongside practising clinicians. Every game is tried in real sessions before it ships, and the feedback we hear most often — it was too long, the words were too big, the child wanted to move the thing themselves — is what shapes the next version. There is no clinic behind the name, no investors to answer to, and no ambition to become an assessment or diagnostic tool.
What it is not: a replacement for professional care, a diagnostic instrument, or a place to store clinical records. The games are a way into the conversation. Anything you keep is a short recap you write yourself, and you decide whether it leaves your screen.
Every game runs in the browser, needs no printing, and takes under ten minutes — so the session stays about the young person, not the setup.
Children and families never sign in. The practice link opens the sample games on any phone or tablet, with nothing to install.
Games are shaped around CBT, DBT and trauma-informed practice, and refined from how they actually land in live sessions.
Recaps keep initials only — never a child’s full name — plus what came up in the game. Card details are handled on the payment page and never stored here.