Beginner's Guide to Having your Child Start Therapy

Video Transcript

CAROLYN MCINTYRE: My name is Carolyn McIntyre. I'm a licensed clinical social worker, a certified employee assistance professional and I have training in life coaching. This clip is a beginner's guide to having your child start therapy. In thinking about therapy for a child, you need to consider, first of all, the age of the child. For children that are very young that means grammar school and under. The focus is very different than when a child is a teenager. When you have very young children, what is often the focus of that age is, is the child meeting developmental milestones? Are they developing their language skills and are they developing in school? If they are having problems in their development or social problems, then you might want to consider an evaluation, and a psycho educational evaluation is a thorough evaluation that requires several hours and a number of different professionals. It might require the involvement of psychologists and neurologists and to see whether the child has any problems in language expression or any problems in hearing or memory or comprehension. A lot of what is called acting out behaviors that you may see in schools such as temper tantrums may also be connected to problems with language comprehension and development. So it's very important to have that evaluation and see what are the child's strengths and weaknesses and how are they developing compared to other kids their age. Around one and six kids have some kind of developmental disability and the evaluation can show what those areas are that the child needs help with. Any of these issues whether they are problems in writing, language comprehension, there can problems in memory or information retrieval, all of these can affect a child's self-esteem and also contribute to social problems. After the evaluation is completed, the evaluators might recommend additional support for your young child such as speech and language help or occupational therapy. If they have just recommended traditional therapy for a young child, then what you want to do is keep in mind that there are a couple of different approaches to child therapy. Standard therapy for a young child is either play therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy. Play therapy builds on what children naturally do and it's allowing you to enter their world and see how they are experiencing things and learning. In play therapy, the child will act things out using dolls and toys and usually show what are the areas that they are focused on, other areas of stress. They might role play. They might also act out things in the play where they are having difficulty. Cognitive behavioral therapy would focus on a behavior their child has, and if those behaviors are problematic, it helps them to come up with alternative behaviors that are better for them and better for their social interactions in school. In thinking about therapy for a child, parents should meet with the therapist first, and, of course, the parents should feel comfortable with the therapist before beginning any therapy for a child. So the five key points to remember in therapy fore children is number one, you need to keep in mind what's the age of the child and look for a therapist that specializes in that particular age. Parents should meet with the therapist first and make sure that feel comfortable with the therapist. Parents need to let the therapist know if there are any social issues or any problems in school. The therapist should be made aware of any evaluations or special needs that a child has. The therapist also needs to be made aware of any family issues, any changes in the family and how the child is doing in school.