Child Therapy

Children come to psychotherapy, just as adults do, with an urgent need for their emotional suffering to be understood and related to on a sufficiently deep level. Differently from adults, though, communicating about children’s emotional distress and needs works better through imaginative play and art making, rather than talking alone.

I love my work with children. It keeps me engaged, alive and challenged in a way completely different than adult work. Children think and feel the same things that adults do, but a lot more intensely, and communicating with them requires a willingness to fully enter their world. Children’s natural capacity to live more fully than adults do in their bodies, their hearts and their spirits, to revere the natural world and that of the imagination makes working with them exciting, hopeful and dynamic.

I work well with children ages 3-12 struggling with fears, anxiety, moodiness, anger, social difficulties and parental separation and divorce. I warmly invite into my practice children of LGBT parents, of single parents and adoptive parents.

My work with children naturally also involves their parents, both so I can better understand their child, and so that I can support the parents in helping their child thrive. I respect how tender and complicated it can be for a parent to have their child in therapy, and strive to approach parents with the same attitude of curiosity, openness, humility I bring to each session with their child.

image: courtesy of willie ablao.