Therapy For Children & Teens

Children are constantly “on-the-grow!” THAT makes it easy to try to wait-and-see when behavioral and emotional “hiccups” are happening. These “hiccups” may look like:

• Crying often, yelling at, or hitting peers at school,

• Expressing fear at bedtime and missing important hours of sleep (as do you),

• Getting nattered at by teachers to “Pay attention!”…”Finish your work!”

• Strongly preferring isolating activities, such as video-gaming, to real-time interaction with friends and, especially important, you,

• Expressing through behavior a need to feel control (e.g., through perfectionism, poor sportsmanship, avoidance of risk, challenge of rules, etc.).

When the wait-and-see feels long, parents begin to yearn for professional support.

I recently have transitioned to a fully virtual practice. As such, I no longer am available to work directly with young children, who much benefit from work and play in a physical space. However, I do bring my training and years of experience to family support through therapy, consultation, and coaching as a prelude to, along-side, or alternative to individual therapy support for your young child.

Flexibility in the way we see situations, in our expectations for the outcome, and in our response is a key feature of a resilient way of being in the world!

For teens…

Your teen is designed to constantly evolve into the independent resilient hunter/gatherer they are meant to be.   Sometimes this goes off without too many hitches.  If your child is lucky enough to move through childhood securely attached and consistently experiencing a trusting, protective relationship with parents, then we have a teen who we can be pretty certain will “return to base” (parents!) for help with stress at school or with friends FIRST.

For reasons often out of our control,  children are growing up these days more anxious and more isolative than that trajectory assumes!   Perhaps because their parents also are wrestling with a more complicated life than ever before and experience/express  their own stress, our children often grow into their teens “deciding” that they should take care of their own problems and anxieties and not “burden” us with their stress!

So, you might encounter one of the following experiences:

• one where your reasonably relational teen begins to be more assertive/challenging as they approach “launching” – as if to “leap” into adulthood without acknowledging the poignant passage away from your nurturant care.  (Hah!  And saving you from that sadness as well!)  

• one where your teen is secretive, isolative, and sometimes managing stress in unhealthy ways, again, rather than coming to you for help! 

• one where your teen who seems to be moving through high school on a normal trajectory toward  independence takes a nose-dive around 11th grade and, suddenly, seems to be sabotaging that effort!

All of these patterns, and others related to becoming one’s own “self”  cause dilemmas in the family and can be an appropriate point of contact for individual and family therapy with a Clinical Psychologist!  When your teen works with me, we are exploring and documenting the range of feelings – known and anticipated – and building skills for resilience in tackling new and challenging tasks,  where failure and “do-overs” are a given, and where stress management strategies are learned and practiced.   When we have an opportunity to add in family therapy, we build the emotional bridge between the gaps in your growing up-and-out experiences  and your ability to support your teens as they grow “up-and-out” in healthy and resilient ways! Here, the virtual space often works well, especially since our teens are so familiar with and adept at their technology!