By Daisy Vergara, LMHC, RPT
Building a child’s mental health is much like building a house.
A good house needs a good foundation, with good building materials and as with any new building, the foundation needs to set in properly or there will be cracks in it. We also need to do regular maintenance in the house to keep it in a good shape. This is the same with a child’s mental health. The first few years of a child’s life involve building a foundation and a strong structure.
All children go through the various developmental stages of life.
Each developmental stage is faced with its own challenges. During early childhood, children experience exponential growth in cognitive, language, and social domains. These growing abilities translate into the ability to communicate needs and wants, having insight into the mental and emotional states of their peers and others and in achieving academic success.
However, just like building a house, simply having the right material is never enough; knowing how to use the good material one possesses is what is eventually important. Children may have the skills and the ability to understand that they need to behave in certain ways but they need guidance on how to use their skills to achieve that.
They also need guidance when it comes to certain coping skills to deal with each developmental challenge and any adjustment that comes with it. These challenges can be frustrating and a confusing process for everybody.
For example, as simple as transitioning from preschool to kindergarten, or from elementary school to middle school might sound, for children, these are huge transitions. Everything is changing and new for them, which means a number of different things such as new school, classmates, teachers, rules, and structures. All of these things are anxiety provoking. Your child may regress or start showing some behaviors that are puzzling to you.
Here is where I will come in to the picture.
I will guide you in understanding your child’s behavior and assist you in connecting with your child on his or her level in order to ease your child’s anxiety and smooth over the transitions.
For me, child therapy serves as a vehicle in helping children working through the challenges in their lives.
I strive to work with you and your child, to understand the challenges that your child may face and to facilitate the process of guiding your child to navigate his/her own developmental challenges so your child can cope with internal and external stresses appropriately.
