Providing a safe and supportive environment
Children and young persons counselling provides a safe and supportive environment where children can express their thoughts and feelings, work through challenges, and develop coping strategies. This isn’t a place for adults to sign them into to “fix” the issues that adults perceive their child or young person to have. It is a place for the young person to be themselves and do and say whatever they want.
Child centred counselling allows the child / young person to be in a place once they develop trust with the therapist to ‘just be’. It has to be developmentally appropriate: techniques and interventions are tailored to be age-appropriate and also a safe environment: a space has to be created where children feel safe and understood.
A variety of resources are used to enable this process to develop, among which include arts and crafts, darts, board games, cards, dominos, lego and lego figurines, soft toys, pebbles and fidget toys.
The fact that the therapist is not known to the child it can take a while to build up trust so it is important that parents/caregivers are aware of this process and not put pressure on the child to achieve ‘results’ from therapy. It may be the case that the results the child or young person will achieve from counselling maybe not viewed by the parent/caregiver. This can be frustrating for the person who is paying a lot of money for therapy for the child / young person.
