Child Psychotherapy

Child Therapy - A Complete Guide

It’s difficult for parents or guardians to see their child suffering mentally. Furthermore, you may find difficulties in discussing child therapy. Parents may have confusion on whether to take their child for child therapy or not. This stigma has made us forget how vital child therapy is in improving your child’s conditions. It allows you to help your child when they are struggling in their minds due to emotional trauma.

PsychThru can provide child psychotherapy in Pakistan to counsel children, their parents, or a family member.

What is Child Therapy?

Child therapy means counseling for children that aims to change children’s behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. It helps them resolve their inner conflicts and understand the situation better through sessions with a mental health therapist.

How to take a child for counseling?

If you are confused about taking your child to child counseling, you should first understand their situation. You can talk to your child and listen to what they want to say. Don’t let them think something is wrong. Be relaxed, talk about their problems, and let them understand how a therapist can help.

Benefits of Child Counseling

Children who have endured mental trauma or who have emotional dysregulation may require mental health treatment. Any issue a child faces mentally, sh therapy can show fruitful results. Child therapy assists children in sharing feelings, learning new abilities, reducing anxiety, being active, and recognising their inner thoughts. It also helps in replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. A mental health therapist can also help enable the child to respond to situations better and teach them how their behavior comes with rewards and punishments. Child Therapy can benefit in dealing with:

Parent's Divorce
Trauma-related disorders
Eating Disorders
Moving To A New Place
Physical, sexual, mental, or emotional abuse
Parental Dysfunction

PsychThru provides child psychotherapy in Pakistan to enable children to cope with their mental situations and lessen up problems as mentioned above. This beneficial child therapy can be good for your child, especially if they have received a significant amount of trauma such as a parent’s divorce, someone’s death, chronic illness, etc.

When to go for Child Therapy?

Some signs are there that will allow you to understand whether your child needs child therapy or not. For example, if a child starts behaving unusually or has developmental problems, then chances are that they are going through mental instability. Furthermore, if they are rebelling or getting way too sad, they may also need child counseling. We often mistake such behaviors of our child as normal. Instead, they have deeper meanings behind their sudden behavioral changes. Some more symptoms that your child needs child therapy include:

Sudden academic decline or low grades
Unprovoked aggression and rebel
Withdrawal from social activities
Spending time alone or going into self-isolation
Recurring night terrors, nightmares, or other difficulties

When you’re not sure whether your child needs child therapy or not, the above list of symptoms may help you to decide. If your child shows any symptoms mentioned above, it is the right time to take them to a mental health therapist. PsychThru is a leading child psychologist in Pakistan providing mental health services at affordable rates and ease of access.

What are the goals of Child Therapy?

The common goals of child therapy may differ based on specific scenarios and the problems that your child’s problems. An online mental health therapist’s primary goal is to focus on and solve issues in your child’s life and surroundings that are influencing their behaviour, cognition, and well-being. The main objective is to enable a child to learn skills, methods, or techniques to prepare themselves for any obstacles or challenges to their mental health. Therefore, the crucial goal of child therapy is to help a child cope with certain challenging situations in their lives and deal with those situations positively. The topmost goals of child therapy include:

1 Dealing with Trauma

Some children may get exposed to certain disturbing events that can traumatize them. These may include events that no child should experience. It can have a negative impact on a child’s cognition, causing social numbness, disbelief, astonishment, detachment, emotional numbness, anxiety, terror, and sadness. Child therapy aims to solve these issues of a child. A mental therapist gets familiar with the child’s circumstances and may assist them in dealing with their trauma and overcoming their mental issues.

2 Dealing with Changes

Many children may not be able to deal with sudden changes such as moving to a new place, changing schools, divorce or remarriage of parent/s, living with another relative, losing a favorite pet or a loved one, joining a foster care system, etc. Adults can adapt to such changes, but children simply can’t. This can add difficulties to a child’s daily life. That’s why child therapy aims to help a child cope with the changing situations and focus on the positive parts of their lives. A mental health therapist may also help a child practice positive self-talk, breathe deeply, and stay calm under changing situations.

3 Enhancing Self Esteem and Self Confidence

When having mental instability, a child may suffer from reduced self-confidence and self-esteem. Such thinking may lead to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicidal or self-harming thoughts. They may begin to believe that they are useless and that no one needs them. Child counseling can help change the thought with positive ones to improve their self-confidence and self-esteem.

4 Coping with Parent's Divorce

A divorce of someone a child loves (for example – parents) may heavily affect their thoughts and mental state. Most of the time, they may start blaming themselves as the reason for the divorce. They may start to think that it wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t exist. Furthermore, child custody issues after divorce add fuel to the child’s negative thoughts since they have to choose one parent.A psychological therapist can help such childs cope with their feelings and parent’s divorce.

5 Tackle Mental Illnesses

A crucial objective of child therapy is helping children cope with their mental illnesses and get better. Such therapies help them manage their emotional distresses and other mental illnesses such as depression, ADHD, anxiety, sleeping disorders, eating disorders, mental exhaustion, etc. A mental psychotherapist allows the child to feel that they have someone to talk to about their feelings and state of mind. It will enable them to share the bottled emotions inside them.