How does Counseling help my kid through the divorce?

Support new father/child time

Rearranging your family is a major life transition for you and your children. It comes with a lot of feelings as well as logistics. Counseling is a great place to help your child build tools, understanding and resiliency. It is also a wonderful place to help parents learn some skills and tools to navigate this major transition. Here are some practical ways that counseling can help.

1.  Safe Space

Counseling provides a safe space for your children to express, learn about and manage all of the emotions that go with rearranging a family. Often children will experience a wide range of emotions including sadness, anger, confusion, anxiety and other challenging emotions. Counseling provides a safe space where your child can express freely their concerns without worry of hurting their parents feelings.

2.  Understanding the rearranged family

Children and teens are egocentric, meaning they think the world revolves around them. This is developmentally typical because their brains are still growing! However, when we have BIG things happen, they often think that they are at fault or could have prevented it some way. As grown-ups, we know that divorce is a grown-up thing and that our kids couldn’t have done anything to make it or break it! Counseling provides a safe space for kids to explore these complex feelings, understand their role and learn about complexities of relationships.

3.  Teaching Tools

Counseling provides a space to not only explore emotions and dynamics but also build skills and tools for managing stress, anger, sadness, and other difficult emotions. Your kiddo will learn how to manage and regulate emotions. These skills will help children learn to adapt to change and navigate adversity.

4.  Communication

Through counseling, children and teens learn skills to help them communicate with both parents their needs and emotions. Counselors work with parents to learn new strategies to improve communication to reduce misunderstanding or tension during and after a divorce.

5. 

Supporting Parents in the New Roles

Children and teen counselors, work with parents to help them understand their child through this big transition. Counselors can also work with you to help support your child through the new routines, new family members, providing guidance and tools for supporting coparenting, and giving you tools to continue to support your child in growing.

Growing Mom/child time

Overall Counseling supports your child learn more about themselves, their situation, build skills and provide parenting support.