Child Counseling & Therapy
Find the Best Child Therapist Possible to Help Your Young Child and You Move Forward with Confidence and Truly Flourish
Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs we’ll ever have. Parenting is messy, and it is a continuous process of trial and error.
Letting go of perfectionism can be liberating and asking for help takes courage, especially when our children are struggling at home, at school, with their peers or in some area in their lives.
While our primary responsibility as parents is to love our children, we also want to protect them and keep them safe enough to explore the world around them and become emotionally healthy, independent adults.
We are available to help if your child is encountering any of the following problems:
- Symptoms of anxiety, trauma, or emotional distress, which can include difficulties sleeping or frequent nightmares, becoming withdrawn, moodier, more agitated, or throwing more tantrums than usual, drastic changes in appetite, recurring stomach aches or headaches, being exceptionally needy or “clingy,” and struggling with separation anxiety
- Misbehaving at home, acting impulsively or disrespectfully, or isolating from the rest of the family
- Difficulties getting or keeping friends
- The grief and loss caused by changing schools, a long-distance move, a relationship breakup, divorce, or the death of a close friend or family member
- Bullying or abuse from siblings or peers
- Academic difficulties, such as consistently poor grades, test-taking anxieties, or struggling with homework
- Learning disorders or developing a severe illness or disability
How Child Counseling & Play Therapy Can Help
We incorporate age-appropriate interventions to enhance children’s emotional awareness and increase their emotional vocabulary.
We can engage your child in play therapy and/or art therapy to help them tell their story and process what they are experiencing; and we practice coping tools for emotional regulation and promote social emotional learning.
Play therapy, in conjunction with talk therapy, has been shown time and time again to be more effective in helping younger children communicate, work through, and resolve difficult and painful emotions.
Play therapy allows children to express themselves and tell their story in an indirect way.
While play itself can be a healing process, play therapy uses drawing, art, clay, sand, storytelling, puppetry, and dolls or other figures to encourage a child to recreate their frustrations or disappointments, express their feelings and experiences, and improve cognitive functioning and emotional development.
Whenever possible, therapy must be done in a client’s natural language. And a child’s natural language is play.
In effect, play therapy uses the natural way children learn about themselves, others and their relationships with the world around them to help them:
- Express their feelings and effectively communicate with others
- Manage their emotional responses, including dealing with anger management problems or other behavioral issues
- Overcome traumatic experiences
- Develop problem-solving and social skills
- Practice effective healthy coping skills
- Work through feelings of grief and loss
- Feel more confident and truly love themselves
We also coach mindful parenting. As a parent, self-regulating is very important for healthy child development. Children want to be loved and treated with respect and we can learn to practice this as a family.
Can a Child Therapist Help Your Child and You?
A large part of our work as child therapists is helping young children explore, express, and understand their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and develop better coping skills to deal with the numerous challenges they face, both now and in the future.
With a little time, patience, understanding, and a willingness to go through the process, child counseling and play therapy can help your child work through and resolve their feelings about whatever situation they’re facing, better understand, respect, and love themselves and others, improve their self-expression and self-actualization, as well as help them lay the foundation to move forward in their lives with confidence and optimism.
For more information about how the child counseling and therapy services we provide can help both your child and you, contact us today to schedule a free, 15-minute, initial phone consultation, ask any questions you have, and get matched with the best child therapist for you.