Child Therapy
Thank you for your interest in child therapy. If you would like to schedule an initial consult, please feel free to call or email me directly, or you can click over to the scheduling page to request a consult time that works for you. For more information on child therapy and what to expect, feel free to read more below.
What is child therapy?
Children have a lot to learn and process about the world in ways that can often feel confusing and confounding to adults. Deeply in touch with the world of imagination and non-verbal expression, children often require deep attunement and sensitivity to understand what is going on inside of their hearts, minds, and worlds. For those children who are more sensitive, struggle with extra big emotions, or seem to express fewer emotions, it can seem a daunting task to create the level of attunement that they seem to require.
Gifted and sensitive children often have special needs to process their experience, have their questions about life answered, and to problem-solve seemingly minor issues that other children may not seem to experience as strongly. I offer space for children who seem to struggle with self-expression to engage in conversation, play, and artwork to help convey and identify elements of their experience that they are having trouble verbalizing.
How can child therapy help my child?
The developmental tasks of childhood are unlike any other stage of life. Mastering motor skills, social skills, thoughts and feelings, and sensory input for the first time creates waves of input that can create overwhelm and that children need support to process and make sense of. As adults we can help to facilitate that by ensuring spaces for verbal processing, artistic expression, and helping to give language and form to inner experience.
Child therapy will allow your child to experience an environment with a trusted adult outside of their usual home environment who is specifically in their life to help them talk about their feelings and things that are difficult for them. Having designated space for this role allows children to begin to be more conscious of things that might be troubling them, and to bring them to conscious conversation rather than internalizing their struggles, inferring negative meaning from them about themselves or their capacity, and transferring those feelings of inadequacy into relationship, social and academic patterns that can accumulate into longer-duration, more entrenched issues.
If your child is experiencing shyness, giftedness, intense moods, aggressive behavior, or other presentations that seem concerning or requiring of extra support, therapy can be a space to examine what your child is experiencing. Symptoms or behavioral challenges are often one of many choices for how to express a particular internal experience, and in addition to trying to understand the internal experience, we can work with children to find more productive ways of expressing and responding to challenging situations.
What to expect in child therapy
To begin therapy for your child, the first step is to have a brief consult call to discuss what you’re looking for and assess fit. You can schedule that here or call or email me. This initial call will be 15-20 minutes, for us to get to know one another a bit, and explore what you’re looking to get out of therapy for your child.
Next, we will schedule a first appointment, at a pre-established rate. I will send you some paperwork in advance, in order for us to dive right in at your child’s first appointment. Provided you and your child wish for us to continue working together, I request that initial sessions take place weekly for at least the first three months, before we determine whether to move to a more sporadic schedule. That said, all of this is up for discussion at anytime and voicing your needs is encouraged for both your family and your child.
Weekly sessions for children revolve around a combination of talk therapy, play therapy, artwork, and collaborative activities like playing a board game or card game. In the process of building rapport and trust through these activities, I will gradually weave in the topics that the child is struggling with, whether they be emotional, behavioral, social, or academic. I will integrate each session with some degree of teaching and learning, and some form of activity for the child.
Children are sometimes more open in their skepticism about therapy, and that is okay. I will encourage you to stay in the waiting area during your child’s session so that we can consult with you if they wish to go home early or to speak with you during the course of their session. Each timeslot will be 50-minutes long. At the end of session, I will typically invite the parent in for a few minutes to do a check in and talk about what we’ve been learning.
We can continue to work together as long as your child likes, provided your child is finding benefit in the process. I will periodically check in to see how you and your child think things are going, and what you each might wish to focus on if it seems we are plateauing. My goal is to ensure that my time together with your child is intentional and worthwhile for them, even if sometimes that means starting session unsure of what they want to talk about or do that day and being open to what might arise spontaneously.
Confidentiality and parental involvement in child therapy
The topic of confidentiality in therapy is an important one, and therapy is traditionally a protected confidential space. For therapeutic work with children, it is important to have clear agreements with the child and parents about how confidentiality will work. I will work with you to tailor an agreement and style of check-in that works for your family.
I look forward to hearing from you if this sounds like a potential fit!
(323) 688-6771 // hello@nicpas.com