The following information is a direct message from John Mark Kane LMFT, founder of Growth and Change Counseling to every parent that is looking for help for your child. This is important information that Mr. Kane believes is important for you to know about how we do child therapy at Growth and Change Counseling and why we do it this way.
Parent Child Therapy With Growth and Change Counseling – Top 5 FAQS
1. Seeking therapy for your child? What to Expect!
We want our parents to know that we are committed to providing effective and results driven therapy to your child. In order to do that, we will not do therapy with a child unless we are also working with the parents. The reason for this is that anything that goes from you to your child is way more meaningful and effective than anything that goes from any therapist to your child because you have the permanent relationship.
At Growth and Change Counseling we really focus on harnessing your influence and relationship with your child to support you in achieving your goals for your child. We see all behavioral problems as relational problems – even children who are autistic have a desire to connect socially and the struggle they have is the lack of relational intelligence. At Growth and Change Counseling you will experience a holistic approach that seeks to strengthen the parent-child and family bonds while also addressing the individual needs of the child.
2. How We Start Therapy with Children and their Parents
At Growth and Change Counseling, the initial session is conducted with the parents. In this session, we will unpack all of the parents concerns and start laying a foundation for ways in which parents can support their child at home during this treatment process. After the initial session, your therapist will meet with your child for two assessment sessions. The therapist will be developing an understanding of your child’s needs and how they see themselves, their family, and their environment. Then the therapist will have a follow up session with the parents where the treatment plan will be discussed and the steps that have already been put in place will be evaluated.
3. How Many Sessions Should I Expect Parent Child Therapy to Take?
Therapy is a voluntary process and its success is tied to the client’s desire and will to facilitate changes in their life. Each person’s journey is different and while we cannot guarantee that therapy will be completed in x number of sessions, we have a foundational approach we take all of our children and parents through, that foundational approach takes us about 6-8 sessions to complete. By that time, you will have most of the tools you need to be successful and any subsequent sessions would really be focused on making adjustments to your experiences of those relationally intelligent skills.
4. What is the Healthy Goal of Parent Child Therapy at Growth and Change Counseling?
Defining wellness is fundamentally important for good therapy to take place. When kids come into therapy dealing with various kinds of behavioral or social-emotional problems parents have an immediate desire to see their child ‘happy’ or at a minimum, stopping the destructive behaviors. At Growth and Change Counseling, we want to go a step further, we want to focus on fostering relationally intelligent children, well bonded and secure in their relationships with their parents.
As human beings, we don’t get better by focusing on what we don’t want to be. There are plenty of adults that grow up and say, “I don’t want to be like my mom or dad” and they become just like them because they get very focused on what they don’t want to be like.
While our therapists both acknowledge and address the concerns your child is dealing with, our greater focus is to support you and your child in developing the relational intelligence to help your child become well bonded and secure in their relationships with their parents, healthy emotional regulation, and a confident identity rooted in their family as a reference point, rather than in the whims and emotions of their peers.
Relationally healthy children are behaviorally healthy children and that is what Growth and Change Counseling focuses on nurturing and developing through therapy.
5. The Logistics of Parent Child Therapy at Growth and Change Counseling
We take many insurances. We are currently able to take in network Aetna, Anthem Blue Cross, Cigna, United Health Care, Optum EAP, Oxford, Oscar Health, Cigna EAP, Aetna EAP, Kaiser NorCal, Medicare
All Parent Child Therapy sessions are conducted via telehealth through video. This allows us to help more parents and their children by managing time to be available for more parents and children. We understand some people prefer in person and we do not offer that. However, it is not uncommon to have people come to us preferring in person, but they stay with us because they like our methods and our results. At the end of the day, what every parent wants is to have a healthy, relationally intelligence, and socially confidant child. Our results and reviews speak for themselves.
We work with parents and children of all ages from age 0 to 18. For the youngest ages, we do only parent sessions as the child does not have the cognitive capacity to be able to express their needs and benefit from assessment or therapy sessions.
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