Katie Lear, Child Counselor, 706 Northeast Drive Ste 1, Davidson, NC (2025)

09/07/2025

If your child is struggling with OCD symptoms, you may feel at a loss for how to help. Maybe you’ve tried using logic to help your child see how unlikely their worries are. Or, maybe you’ve been working really hard on relaxation and deep breathing techniques, but you aren’t seeing a lot of change. This is totally normal! The usual coping skills that help kids deal with anxiety and stress aren’t as helpful for OCD.
Whether learned at home or in counseling (beneficial for many children with OCD), there are particular techniques to help your child cope. You can help your child learn to understand what OCD is and how it works, and equip them with tools they can use to “fight back” against recurrent worries and rituals. Children with strong coping skills feel less alone, can manage their symptoms better, and they will likely progress through therapy more quickly, too. I’ll be sharing them soon, so stay tuned!

09/06/2025

Milestones like special birthdays, graduations, and other coming-of-age traditions can rekindle grieving feelings for kids. These events, while happy, are also a reminder that someone is missing from the family. This is especially true for children who have lost a parent or caregiver. As kids become young adults, they may be increasingly aware of how their early loss will affect their weddings, the birth of their children, and other life milestones.
If you notice your child has a hard time around the holidays, or enters a period of intense grief when a milestone occurs, it’s okay. It doesn’t mean your child’s grief is getting worse or moving backwards. They’re just looking at their grief with a new perspective and working through it in a deeper way – and that’s a normal, natural part of the process.

08/25/2025

Ultimately, the type of therapy you choose for your child is going to be based on your family’s needs and your child’s specific situation. As you’re weighing your options, here are some potential questions to guide your thinking.

08/25/2025

Many kids (and adults) already know that the arts provide a mood boost. Mediums like dance, visual art, theater, and music can also be integrated into therapy to help children work through feelings and heal from trauma. We call this whole group of methods the expressive arts therapies, since they focus on creative expression.

Like play therapy, using art gives children a way to let out feelings they may not have words for, either because the feeling is too big or because they don’t yet have the vocabulary to do so. Music, dance, art, and drama are multi-sensory experiences, so they help kids engage their bodies and brains at the same time. This can be soothing, help children stay engaged, and even make it easier to process trauma.

Therapists can become specialists in any of the expressive arts, and use them as a way to connect with children in sessions. Your child doesn’t need to have any prior experience in a particular art form in order to do well in expressive arts therapy. All kids are creative thinkers, and therapy is focused on the process of artmaking rather than a finished product!

08/24/2025

Tweens and teens are able to think more abstractly than their younger kids, which means they’re able to grasp the concept of death in ways that younger kids can’t. They understand that death is permanent, and they may wonder about their own mortality or the afterlife when a loved one dies. Even though tweens and teens think about death in similar ways to adults, they still face their own unique emotional challenges.

As kids near the teen years, their friend group becomes increasingly central to their lives. This means tweens and teens may be more likely to turn to their friends for comfort when a loved one dies. If your child is part of a healthy, mature friend group, this can be a great source of support. However, it can be hard for peers who haven’t experienced their own loss to empathize in the way that grieving teens need.

Depending on your relationship with your tween or teen, you may notice that relying more on friends for support means you hear less about your child’s grief. Changes in grades, dropping out of school activities, and self-isolating can all be ways that older kids show they’re struggling with grief. It’s also common for kids in this age range to compare their situation to non-bereaved friends, so keep an eye out for unusual arguing or difficulties with peers. Death is unfair, and it’s easy to feel jealous or angry at a friend who complains about their family when you’ve just suffered a loss in yours.

Finally, tweens and teens are more likely than younger kids to find unhealthy or harmful ways to cope with grief. They may have access to drugs or alcohol, or may use self-harm as a way to deal with strong feelings. Any signs that a child may be considering self-harm or su***de should be taken very seriously, especially when a child is grieving.

08/23/2025

Children often need extra, more specialized support in order to recover from the after-effects of trauma. Highly stressful or dangerous experiences like accidents, illnesses, a death in the family, or exposure to abuse or violence can lead to long-lasting symptoms that don’t resolve on their own. You may notice a child having difficulty sleeping, experiencing big emotional outbursts, or regressing: going back to habits from earlier in childhood, such as thumb-sucking or bedwetting.

Children need to be able to share their feelings about what has happened to them in order to heal. However, traumatic memories can be very overwhelming. Trauma therapists understand how to help children gradually work through these memories in a safe way, so they don’t feel as confusing or hard to manage. This can happen through play, art, storytelling, or just by talking to a counselor.
Trauma therapy can also give kids and parents tools to deal with symptoms of PTSD, which can affect the whole family. One common form of trauma therapy for kids is Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or TF-CBT. This is a step-by-step approach that teaches children skills that build on each other, eventually helping a child to feel comfortable sharing their story with a parent or other supportive adult.

08/17/2025

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is a form of counseling that focuses on helping people learn how to cope with strong emotions by changing their behavior or becoming more aware of their thinking patterns. It’s less focused on uncovering the past or figuring out why a problem evolved the way it did (although you might do some of this in CBT). Instead, the emphasis is on figuring out how to handle the problem now that it’s here, in the present.

One strength of CBT is that it’s an evidence-based treatment, meaning that there’s a lot of research to back it up and prove that it’s effective. Variations of CBT have been designed for pretty much every mental health concern. Exposure and Response Prevention is a specialized form of CBT for children and adults with obsessive compulsive disorder. TF-CBT, which I’ll share about soon, is used for kids and teenagers who’ve survived a trauma. You’ll also see CBT used often with children dealing with anxiety, depression, or angry outbursts.

CBT gives children education to help them better understand their feelings and how they work. This can reduce fear and shame, and empower children to feel more in control of their emotions. They’ll also learn coping skills they can use during difficult moments to deal with their emotions in healthier ways. CBT skills require kids to be able to think abstractly—thinking about your own thinking is a complex skill! For this reason, it’s sometimes a better fit for older children.

08/16/2025

Older children have a more solid understanding of death, which is both good and bad news. On one hand, it’s easier to help kids in this age range understand what’s going on when a loved one dies. On the other, kids tend to develop their intellectual ability to understand death before they build the emotional skills they need to handle the strong feelings of grief. As a result, elementary-aged kids may have the hardest time coping with loss.

Big kids may be wondering why their loved one died and searching for explanations that make sense to them. Kids in the younger end of this age range often believe that their thoughts and feelings have a direct influence on the outside world. This can lead to children worrying that something they said, did, or thought might have caused their loved one’s death. It’s important for children to have a clear explanation for their loved one’s cause of death that removes any possible blame for what happened.

Children may ask repeated “why” questions at this age. It’s likely, though, that your grade schooler will show you their feelings more than they tell them. Physical complaints are common among this age group, and so are problems with sleeping and difficulty concentrating at school. Keep an eye on how your big kid handles school and friends in general: some children may throw themselves into too many activities in an attempt to cope, while others may withdraw from friends and hobbies they once enjoyed.

08/10/2025

This is a special form of therapy designed for toddlers, preschoolers, and young children who are struggling with big behaviors and meltdowns. All little children tantrum, but sometimes these acting-out behaviors get so intense and difficult to manage that it puts a strain on the relationship between parent and child. This creates a vicious cycle of bad behavior, frustration, and disconnection.

Sometimes these behavior struggles are a response to trauma or stress, and other times it may just be due to temperament and sensitivity. Regardless of the reason, therapies like PCIT can help parents and children break the cycle of “bad” behavior, set appropriate limits, and enjoy more time spent together.

You can expect to spend a lot of time in the office with your child if you’re participating in PCIT. You’ll learn skills from your therapist to practice at home, and also get opportunities to use them in real time, with your therapist there to coach you through the process. The first part of PCIT is all about strengthening your relationship with your child through play and positive attention. The second is a set of discipline tools you can use to shape behavior without accidentally fueling the fire.

08/09/2025

Not only do coping skills motivate kids to go deeper in therapy, they’re often a necessary first step. Kids dealing with severe anxiety or trauma spend a lot of their time in fight-or-flight mode. When you’ve got all that adrenaline coursing through your body, you’re focused on survival, not learning.

It’s really hard to effect big, lasting change when a child is too worked up to learn. Effective coping skills soothe the nervous system, so kids can calm themselves more easily and spend less time in fight-or-flight.

If your child is participating in trauma therapy, learning to self-soothe is critical. As children tell deeper and more difficult parts of their story, they may find their symptoms get worse before they get better. Revisiting their coping skills helps kids care for themselves and prevent overwhelm.

08/03/2025

Play therapy builds on a child’s natural tendency to learn about the world through play, so they can work through big feelings and difficult life changes without having to sit and talk for hours on end. Sitting on a couch across the room from a strange adult isn’t always the most natural thing for little kids. Play therapy is a wonderful way for younger children to feel safe and comfortable in the therapy room.

Play therapists like to say that “play is a child’s language, and toys are a child’s words.” With this in mind, you’ll see a wide variety of toys in a play therapist's office that aim to give children a broad vocabulary to choose from. Expect to find nurturing toys, like dolls, aggressive toys, like punching bags, and creative toys, like art supplies. What you probably won’t find a lot of is electronic stuff: most play therapy toys are open-ended to encourage kids to play in a variety of ways.

So how is play in a therapy office different than play at home? Play therapists are trained to notice underlying themes that repeat themselves in a child’s play, and may give insight into how they’re thinking and feeling.

Within the umbrella of play therapy, you’ll find a variety of different approaches. Some play therapists are child-centered, meaning they are trained to follow a child’s lead and let them set the pace for therapy. Others may incorporate education about feelings or coping strategies into play to help children learn new skills.

08/02/2025

Little children are in the earliest stage of understanding death. They’ve probably seen movies or cartoons in which characters die, and this might be their only basis for comparison. Children may assume death means that a person has gone away, fallen asleep, or otherwise left them in a way that is not permanent. They may also worry about whether or not their loved one is afraid or feeling pain.

Any stressful event can cause regressions for preschool-aged kids, and death is no different. You may notice your 3, 4, or 5-year old returning to earlier habits, like thumb-sucking or bedwetting. Your child may be extra clingy for a while, or have trouble sleeping alone when they were once independent.

You might also notice that themes or details from your loved one’s death show up in your child’s play. While it might be a surprise to see your child having a funeral for a Barbie doll, or re-enacting an accident with toy cars, this is usually a healthy sign. Children process feelings through play, so these types of activities help kids make sense of what has just happened in their world. If the play is prolonged, rigidly repetitive, or seems to make your child upset instead of relieved, it might be worth speaking to your child’s doctor or a children’s grief counselor.

Katie Lear, Child Counselor

09/07/2025

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