Child Counseling
Ensuring Your Child’s Healthy Development Is Not An Easy Job!
If you’ve been a parent for any time at all, you’ve already run into your fair share of challenges. Though you’re supportive and loving, sometimes it just seems like kids run hot and cold with nothing in between.
Children naturally have trouble regulating their emotions, so you see a lot of unchecked anger, irritability, anxiety, and overwhelm in their behavior. They may be falling behind in school, struggling to make friends, or withdrawing and just not participating in anything anymore.
Or perhaps you’re considering therapy because your child is going through a difficult time, and you worry about their struggle with anxiety, depression, or another underlying issue that’s holding them back.
Parenting Is Hard – For So Many Reasons
Despite your best efforts, it seems almost impossible most mornings to get your kid out of bed, bathed, dressed, and out of the door. The fixation on video games or “screen time” leaves them distracted, moody, and disconnected.
They may be mean toward siblings or defiant toward you for seemingly no reason. The lack of understanding, communication, and connection makes you feel like you’re not doing enough as a parent. And the residual stress is complicating relationships with your partner or other children.
At LaunchPad Counseling, we understand your pain—and want to help you provide your child with emotional support while still teaching them how to be accountable for their own behavior. You can learn to both course-correct and validate your child so that they feel seen, understood, and loved.
Have any questions? Send us a message!
Childhood Can Be Tough For Kids Today
Being a kid these days is more difficult than ever with the rise of social media, access to screens, and an increasing reliance on technology. Our culture's fixation on individualism and monetary rewards often leads children (and parents) to mistakenly equate academic, social, and extracurricular success with well-being. That, in turn, places a lot of stress on kids to excel and fit in.
Children are engaging less and less in sensory play these days and, instead, structuring their day around learning schedules and screen-related activities. The result is millions of children lacking coping skills and struggling with anxiety and mood dysregulation.
Kids Aren’t The Only Ones Feeling Overwhelmed
Most parents are already overburdened with managing their kids’ schoolwork, extracurriculars, and everything else in the family. On top of that, they’re expected to help their children in ways that very few people are ever trained to do. In fact, never in history has a parent felt so much pressure to play the role of a child counselor like they do today.
Fortunately, play therapy for children at LaunchPad Counseling can be an incredibly effective healing experience. In a 2000-2001 study of first-grade children, researchers discovered a significant and positive relationship between imagination in play and the use of coping strategies and responses.*
Play's non-directive, creative, and spontaneous nature offers a remedy to our "hustle culture" that helps children manage emotions, overcome challenges, and evolve into healthy, happy adults.
Therapy Gives Your Child A Place To Learn, Heal, And Grow
Many of our therapists at LaunchPad Counseling specialize in Play Therapy because we believe that play is the native language of children and the best way to access their inner world. This fun and, oftentimes, non-verbal therapeutic approach gives your child a space to express their stresses, worries, and inner conflict in ways that they may not be able to at home.
As counselors, we know how to respond to play so that your child can resolve their inner conflict, gain new perspectives on their situation, build resilience, and learn how to handle stressful situations in healthy and positive ways.
What Can You Expect As We Get Started?
In the first session, we’ll meet with you and your child together. This will give us time to discuss what you would like help with, how you’ve already tried to improve things, and what you would ultimately want to achieve through therapy. We’ll set short and long-term goals and talk more in detail about how child therapy works.
Building a relationship of trust is the cornerstone of effective therapy. So, if individualized attention will be most helpful, we may have you step out so your child and their therapist can interact one-on-one. If something comes up that needs parental involvement, we will work with your child to improve communication so that they can include you in the conversation.
Though we don’t typically report on the immediate content of sessions, we are here to offer you updates, feedback, and tips on how to handle certain scenarios between sessions. Moreover, we provide coaching services for parents who would like extra guidance for supporting their child in and outside of psychotherapy sessions.
What Kind Of Things Do We Cover In Child Therapy?
Each child is different, so treatment speaks to those unique needs; however, there are common long-term goals that we often focus on:
Increasing self-esteem, confidence, and self-worth
Improving relationships and attunement with caregivers and peers
Learning healthy skills and self-control for better decision-making and more successful behaviors
Play Therapy, in particular, has many excellent benefits. It enables children to see situations from various perspectives. It helps them become more flexible in their thinking. And it promotes creative problem-solving. Children often need to “experience” something in order to learn, so play therapy provides that hands-on experience, enabling kids to fully grasp abstract concepts about self-image, their inner voice, and other complex topics.
How Does Play Therapy For Children Work?
This depends on what you need help with, as there are numerous directive and non-directive ways to approach it. Directive play therapy will focus more on coping skills and structured activities tailored to your child’s behaviors. For instance, if your child lacks certain social skills, we may use specific games, role play, and imaginary social interaction through the use of dolls or puppets.
Non-directive therapy is much less structured but just as effective. Our purpose as non-directive therapists is to provide a space for your child to express their highest self—free from any perceived expectations. We’ll give them a place where they can focus on their own needs and desires while developing a healthy narrative for themselves that they can understand and value.
No One Wants Their Child To Experience Hardship
However, it's important to remember that children rebound and improve with the right interventions much more quickly than adults do. Child therapy is very effective for helping children overcome mood and behavior-related issues. It also puts them in touch with valuable internal resources for navigating the inevitable bumps and bruises of life.
So, if you are ready to help your child prepare for their best life, we can show you how.
Perhaps You’re Still On The Fence About Child Therapy…
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During the initial appointment, we encourage parents to express how much they would like to be involved in their child's psychotherapy sessions. That said, our approach is broad in parent participation.
Theraplay, for example, is exclusively geared toward the parent-child interaction, while more child-centered play therapy may involve the parents much less directly. Whatever your needs are, we’ll make sure to tailor our approach to sessions according to your goals for child therapy.
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Coregulation (e.g., hugging, hand-holding, calm reassurance) and modeling healthy coping behaviors when your child is having a hard time can be tremendously helpful. Personally and professionally, we can't speak enough to the impact of validating your children’s feelings, even when those feelings may not feel proportionate to the situation.
Providing a sensitive structure helps your child regulate their emotions and manage their behavior. Furthermore, our therapists will take time specifically to speak with you every couple of sessions for updates on your child’s treatment and how you can best support them throughout the week.
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You can start by talking with your child's pediatrician, their school, or by requesting a consultation with one of our play therapists. Most kids can benefit from therapy, especially those with disruptive behaviors, low self-esteem, and poor peer relationships. It’s also helpful for children facing difficult life stressors and big, upcoming life transitions. And because we are speaking their native language through play, children see counseling as a fun and positive experience.
Let Us Help You Set Your Child Up For A Happy, Healthy Life
If you are looking for the resources and support to ensure the healthy development of your child, LaunchPad Counseling can help. Please call (804) 665-4681, Email or Contact Us today to set up your first online or in-person child therapy session.
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