About KidSoma

KidSoma was created by Alé Duarte to help educators, therapists, and professionals better understand what children are trying to organize beneath behavior — and support them with more clarity, adaptability, and connection.

Since 2004, KidSoma has grown out of Alé's work in post-disaster zones, refugee camps, and schools worldwide, training professionals in over 30 countries.

The KidSoma Online Practitioner Training now brings this method, forged in the field, into your home and your practice.

At the heart of KidSoma is Flowland — a shared developmental language that helps children and adults recognize stress, strengths, participation, and creative capacity without reducing children to labels or diagnoses.

Today, KidSoma frameworks are used by professionals around the world who are looking for more practical orientation and more human ways of supporting children in complex times.

Why Practitioners Join KidSoma

Professionals working with children are facing increasing complexity. Research suggests that more than 70% of child therapists report seeing emotional and behavioral challenges that are more complex than in previous years.

The KidSoma Practitioner Training offers a practical framework for supporting children's capacity for regulation, participation, creativity, and connection.

Built around two core maps — the Universe of Flowland and the SomaCompass — the training helps practitioners recognize where a child is in their process and respond with greater clarity, confidence, and flexibility.

Rather than focusing on behavior alone, participants learn how to organize sessions that support growth, engagement, and meaningful participation.

The result is a practical, nervous system-informed approach that can be applied across therapeutic, educational, coaching, and caregiving settings.

A Physician's Perspective

Kerstin Heineken is a board-certified specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry. After completing the KidSoma Practitioner Training, she captured her experience and insights in a personal reflection. With her permission, we're sharing an excerpt here:

"KidSoma is something entirely different from anything I've encountered before in (therapeutic) work with children. Alé is a gifted and deeply intuitive guide when it comes to bodywork, regulation, and the integration of traumatic stress in children's experience. Watching him work is a joy, a huge learning opportunity, and a gift.

The line between normal adaptive stress and traumatic stress is an extremely important one — we're constantly moving back and forth across it in treatment. Having a model for this in mind is enormously helpful.

My own listening has changed too. I no longer get as distracted by content. Noticing breaks, transitions, shifts in tone of voice, facial expression, and posture — that's what real listening means to me now. As a result, children themselves develop more awareness of their inner processes and feel more helpfully accompanied.

The power of symbols has deeply impressed me. Diagnoses can sometimes make working with children rigid and impossible. But with an image to work with, things can continue playfully, with curiosity and openness. Flowland is a treasure trove of images and metaphors, and it helps so much in understanding where things get difficult for a child.

My vision is a regulation group for children, where parents can observe and learn what helps their children feel safe, integrate, participate, and ultimately process what they've experienced in calm and safety. I now feel much more confident in group work with children and have many new ideas.

I'm fascinated by this ‘different' way of looking at children and their behavior, and by the invitation to approach difficulties differently. I'm firmly convinced that everyone leaves this course profoundly and positively changed — seeing children (and adults too) differently, and relating to and working with them differently. So go for it! :-)"

— Kerstin Heineken
Board-Certified Specialist in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Flowland & the Soma Compass

Flowland introduces a developmental map of how children naturally move through experiences and tasks. Rather than focusing first on behaviour, it helps us observe how momentum emerges, develops, slows down, and eventually comes to completion. Its playful characters offer children and adults a shared language for exploring where an experience is unfolding naturally—and where it has become interrupted. 

The Soma Compass complements this by helping practitioners organize their perception when a child becomes stuck. Instead of asking, "What's wrong?", it offers a way to orient within the child's current organization—through presence, self-regulation, expression, and adaptability. This makes it easier to recognize which capacities are already available, which are under strain, and where an intervention is most likely to support movement again.

Together, these two frameworks provide both a map and a compass. Flowland helps us understand the developmental journey unfolding through a task, while the Soma Compass helps us orient ourselves whenever that journey loses momentum. Rather than reacting to behaviour, we learn to accompany the child's process with greater clarity, precision, and confidence.

Why Flowland Invites Children to Collaborate

• It feels like play, not like teaching or therapy
• The child is met exactly where they are, without judgment
• Movement, imagination, and creativity do the inviting, not instructions
• The child experiences themselves as capable and effective
• It works with the child's own rhythm of rest and activity, not against it
• Cooperation becomes a felt choice, not a demand

About Alé Duarte

Alé Duarte is an international educator and the creator of the KidSoma Method. For over 30 years, he has worked with therapists, educators, and professionals supporting children across diverse cultural and clinical settings.

His work integrates child development, self-regulation, somatic awareness, and play-based approaches to help practitioners better understand children's behavior and support meaningful participation, growth, and connection.

Through the KidSoma Practitioner Training, Alé shares practical frameworks such as the Universe of Flowland and the SomaCompass, helping professionals develop greater clarity, confidence, and adaptability in their work with children.

Choose Your Option

Interés en Programas KidSoma en Español

Nos alegra mucho que estés aquí.

Cada vez más profesionales nos preguntan por la posibilidad de participar en entrenamientos, talleres y programas de KidSoma en español. Estamos explorando cómo crear esta próxima etapa junto a la comunidad hispanohablante.

Si te gustaría recibir noticias cuando abramos nuevas oportunidades en español, deja tus datos en el formulario a continuación.

Así podremos mantenerte informado/a sobre futuros programas, eventos y novedades de KidSoma en español.