Child Therapy
Is Your Child Struggling With Difficult Emotions?
Are you the parent of a child who is currently trying to process or cope with intense negative feelings? Do their symptoms include:
- Headaches, panic attacks, or compulsive worrying?
- Sadness, reduced energy, or social withdrawal?
- Decreased or increased eating or sleeping?
- Self-blame, feelings of guilt, or thoughts of self-injury?
Perhaps your child has had issues lately at school or problems socializing with friends or family. Maybe they have even been experiencing symptoms of anxiety, depression, trauma, or ADHD, and you’re trusting that therapy can offer them some real support.
Children Often Do Not Understand Yet How To Process Intense Feelings
Your child may struggle to start their day or experience a fear of going to school or being away from you at all. Or they may be unable to properly function throughout their day, having trouble focusing or transitioning from activity to activity.
They may also have difficulty communicating what they are feeling, which can cause you to respond to their reactions and not their underlying emotions. And you have likely wondered how you can help them better process their feelings and feel happier and more at ease.
Fortunately, numerous effective treatment options do exist for many of these struggles regularly faced by children. Therapy with Center For Resiliency can help your child learn valuable coping techniques and help you both better communicate and connect.
Mental Health Issues Are Surprisingly Common For Children
In contrast to most adults, children are typically at a disadvantage when exposed to various life stressors, since they have not undergone as much cognitive, social, or emotional growth yet. It is thus important to offer them outside help for any mental or emotional issues they are experiencing before these symptoms get worse.
According to the CDC, 9.8 percent of children between the ages of 3 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, with 9.4 percent diagnosed with some form of anxiety and 4.4 percent diagnosed with some form of depression (1). In addition, many of these conditions can often cooccur, so these issues may be even more prevalent.
Various Factors Have Contributed To A Decline In Children’s Mental Health
Unsurprisingly, certain issues can make a child more likely to have trouble processing their emotions, such as the experience of past trauma. On top of this, other larger factors like social media and children’s exposure to stressors, such as mass violence, climate change, cyberbullying, and political polarization, have all contributed to the decline in mental health for kids.
The good news, however, is that these factors can be addressed and managed through therapy with a dedicated child counselor who cares. All of our clinicians at Center For Resiliency use evidence-based treatment methods designed to help your child make real-life progress as quickly as possible.
(1) https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html
Child Therapy Can Help Kids Be Happier And Healthier
Because children are so young, they have developed fewer coping mechanisms for dealing with negative events and emotions. And since the internal resources of a child have yet to fully form or solidify, they are mostly dependent on external resources, such as parents, caregivers, or professionals, to help them heal and navigate adversity. This is where child therapy comes into play.
Working with a mental health therapist can help you and your child develop the skills to channel emotions in a way that is both healthy and helpful. At Center For Resiliency, we have been there, and we get it. It is not fair for your child to feel so frustrated all the time and we want to help them like we have so many other kids.
What You And Your Child Can Expect From Therapy
Before you and your child begin therapy sessions, you will have the chance to speak more with your counselor about your child’s history and symptoms. You will then begin to develop a custom treatment plan specific to your child’s situation and needs.
Because children learn through modeling and application, therapy sessions will involve interactive play, talking, drawing, moving, and creating, all of which facilitate self-expression of a child’s core issues. The end of each therapy session is then devoted to the parent, with your child’s therapist offering emotional support while teaching you parent management techniques.
Treatment Methods That Are Flexible And Versatile
Your child therapist will have numerous counseling approaches at hand, including:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) – CBT for children, which can also include Trauma-Focused CBT, aims to identify and make positive changes to your child’s thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.
- Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) – Based on CBT, DBT for children addresses the processing of your child’s most intense or difficult emotions.
- Parent Management Training (PMT) – PMT involves teaching parents the skills to respond more effectively to their child’s behaviors.
- Social Skills Training (SST) – SST works to build skills that ease social anxiety and improve social behavior.
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) – EMDR therapy for children employs eye stimulation to process negative events and emotions.
- Somatic Therapy (ST) – Somatic therapy targets and releases psychological pain trapped in the body.
Through a combination of these modalities, your child will learn how to label and respond to emotions, tolerate challenging situations, socialize with peers and adults, process any stressors or trauma, and be more mindful of behaviors.
By working with your counselor, your child can learn how to better manage their symptoms, their behavior, and your mutual communication. Our goal is for children to emerge from therapy happier, healthier, and more well-adjusted—ready to meet the emotional challenges that they will experience on their journey into adulthood.
You may still have some concerns about Child Therapy
My child has been in therapy before and it did not help.
Our approach at Center For Resiliency is likely different from the other practices that you have worked with. Your child might be the patient, but you are part of the solution as well! This is why we meet with parents at the end of every session in order to assist you with the parenting work that will help your child move forward in both therapy and life.
What if my child will not open up in therapy?
This is a valid concern! In fact, it may even be unfair to expect your child to speak openly about their feelings if this is the very skill they are currently working on. However, our clinicians will spend time building a rapport of trust with your child so they know it is safe to open up. We also employ treatment methods specifically designed to engage your child in therapy, including techniques that do not require verbal expression.
How do I talk to my child about going to therapy?
You know your child best! Often, it is ideal to keep the explanation about therapy brief and let the child therapist do the explaining. Your child might already have a general sense of why they are being brought to therapy, so feel free to build off of that. For example, if they have expressed that they are nervous about going to school, you can tell them that they are going to meet with a specialist that will help them feel better and calmer.