Child, Adolescent & Parent Consultation
Underneath children’s behaviors is a rich inner world that deserves curiosity, respect, and care.
Young children often communicate through play, behavior, creativity, and imagination before they can put experience into words. Adolescents have their own language as they negotiate privacy, belonging, and independence.
Children's behaviors are rarely random. Anxiety, withdrawal, anger, perfectionism, emotional outbursts, or school difficulties may communicate something that has not yet found words. Rather than asking, “What is wrong with this child?” I find it more helpful to ask, “What might this child be trying to tell us?”
Child Therapy
Children come to therapy for anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD, emotional dysregulation, school or social challenges, family transitions, and more. What may appear to be defiance, lack of motivation, or attention-seeking behaviors may reflect anxiety, emotional needs, developmental differences, or sensory sensitivities.
Depending on age and needs, therapy may involve play, creative activity, shared reflection, practical support, and collaboration with parents or other important systems. The goal is not simply to eliminate symptoms, but to support emotional development, self-esteem, secure attachment, resilience, and family relationships.
Adolescent Therapy
Adolescence is a profound period of transformation. Belonging among peers may feel as essential as air, and many parents struggle to navigate the abrupt shift from a child with whom they felt closely bonded to a teenager with a growing need for privacy and autonomy. Underneath that shift, adolescents still need their parents, though in a different way, and those relationships remain crucial. One central task is the essential psychological process of moving away from family so that, over time, adolescents can come closer again from a more secure place.
Therapy offers adolescents a confidential space to navigate this process and work through struggles involving anxiety, depression, identity, relationships, neurodiversity, school stress, or family conflict.
Working With Parents
Parents know their children in ways no clinician can. Parent consultation offers room to think together about what a child may be communicating and how development, temperament, neurodiversity, family relationships, and transitions shape the family's interactions.
It may include practical tools as well as attention to both the child’s and the parent’s emotional experiences. Raising children can reconnect us with our own childhoods, hopes, fears, and unresolved questions; greater curiosity and flexibility in parents can create change throughout the family system.
Common Reasons Families Seek Therapy
- Anxiety, OCD, intrusive thoughts, and emotional regulation
- ADHD, autism, executive functioning, and neurodiversity
- School stress, school refusal, perfectionism, and self-esteem
- Friendship, social, and sibling difficulties
- Family transitions, divorce, grief, and trauma
- Identity, gender, sexuality, and belonging
- Parenting challenges and parent-child conflict
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my child needs therapy or is going through a normal developmental phase?
Children and adolescents often express distress through changes in mood, behavior, relationships, or functioning. These changes do not necessarily mean that something is wrong. I consider them in the context of the child’s development, temperament, relationships, family, and current circumstances.
An initial consultation can help us think together about what may be happening and what kind of support, if any, would be most useful.
How involved are parents when a child or adolescent is in therapy?
Parents are an important part of the work. As a general guideline, I meet with parents about once a month, though this may be more or less frequent depending on the child and what is happening.
With adolescents, parents are often less directly involved to allow enough privacy for the teenager to develop a trusting therapeutic relationship.
What if my child or teenager does not want to come to therapy?
It is not unusual for a child or teenager to be reluctant to come to therapy, especially when it was not their idea. I do not expect them to arrive ready to talk.
The work often begins by building trust, getting to know what matters to them, and finding less direct ways of being together while allowing trust and a therapeutic relationship to develop over time.
Can parent consultation help even if my child is not in therapy?
Yes. Sometimes meaningful change can happen through work with parents, even when the child is not participating directly. Understanding a child differently and changing how parents respond can shift patterns within the family and, in turn, the child’s experience and behavior.
Parent consultation can be useful on its own or as part of a child’s treatment.
How do you protect my child’s privacy while keeping me involved as a parent?
Children and adolescents need enough privacy to feel that therapy is genuinely their space, while parents also need to remain appropriately involved in their child’s care. How we balance these needs depends on the child’s age and circumstances.
I discuss confidentiality, parental involvement, and the limits of privacy with parents and children at the beginning of treatment so that everyone has a clear understanding of how we will work together.