Therapy for Children With Depression in New York
As a parent, knowing the signs of depression in children can help detect a shift in your child’s happiness, daily routines and overall mood. Every child’s depression can appear different on the outside, and taking the necessary steps to seek treatment for your loved one is vital for hearing their thoughts and validating their feelings. This process can be a long journey for you and your child, but you are not alone.
Learn the common signs of depression in children and teenagers and where to seek depression therapy for kids.
Understanding Depression in Children
Depression is a mood disorder that can impact individuals of any age, including younger children and teenagers. Children have the potential to fly under the radar of a depression diagnosis due to the similarity in tantrums and shyness relating to the common symptoms of this mood disorder.
Recent studies show that about 3% of children and teens aged 3 to 17 had depression, while 13.3% of this population experienced at least one depressive episode. This small number of reported cases of depression could result from unknown symptoms of this mood disorder, so understanding what depression can look like is the first step to seeking the right support for your child.
You might notice depression manifest in different ways, such as your child having trouble concentrating in school or maintaining friendships. They might lose interest in their favorite hobbies or withdraw from you. Early treatment can help your child move forward with healthier coping skills and strengthen your family’s bonds.
Signs Your Child Might Need Depression Therapy
Depression can look different for every child. While your loved one may not show every sign of depression, try to monitor any drastic changes in behavior to see if child therapy for depression is the best route for their overall health and happiness. The most common symptoms of depression in children and teenagers include:
Try to keep in mind that children and teenagers may have a more challenging time expressing their feelings in words, so they can experience depression differently than adults. Even just letting them know you love and support them lets them know they are not alone, and help is right around the corner in the form of therapy for child depression.
Child Therapy Treatment Options
Some kids find it challenging to talk about depression. At Courageous Kids Counseling, our priority is building trust and being patient about letting your child speak when they feel most comfortable. We may use a few types of methods to help your child open up and work through depressive symptoms:
- Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): These sessions involve agreed-upon goals to replace negative thought patterns with more productive, healthy ones.
- Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT): DBT combines mindfulness techniques and CBT to help your child understand and accept their complex emotions.
- Biofeedback: These sessions help your child relax and control physical symptoms of depression, like tension and restlessness.
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): This type of therapy helps children with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, dissociation, attachment and self-regulation issues.
- Play therapy: Sometimes, the best way to understand the root cause of a child’s depression is by telling stories and asking them if the situation matches their experience. Play therapy can help kids open up, allowing us to understand their symptoms better and help them through them.
When to Seek Help for Kids’ Depression
While it’s normal for children to have mood swings or feel sad or irritable at times, depression is different. After a while, kids tend to feel better after moments of sadness or mood swings. Depression symptoms often hang on for much longer.
Consider seeking help for your child if you notice their irritability or hopelessness lingers, or if it affects their sleep, appetite or relationships with others. Depression that keeps your child from enjoying school or their favorite sports and hobbies is another warning sign. If your child’s symptoms last two weeks or more or they have expressesd thoughts of suicide, reach out to a mental health professional.
What Is Children’s Therapy for Depression Like?
Therapy is not a one-size-fits-all type of treatment. Every child reacts differently to counseling approaches, and sometimes getting started on the process of therapy can open the door to better options available to help them recover from depression. Kids’ depression therapy might look like:
- Play and building trust: Child counseling for depression starts like most interactions with younger children. Through playful interactions, children can learn to build a trusting bond with their licensed therapist and develop problem-solving skills together as a team.
- Creating healthy habits: Communication, experimentation and working through problems with an adult during child therapy can develop healthy habits and decision-making when depressive thoughts arise.
- Strengthening relationships: Over time, your child can begin to feel happier when they feel in control of any problem they face head-on, creating more opportunities to strengthen relationships with family and friends.
What Is Therapy for Teenage Depression Like?
Teen therapy differs from child counseling, giving teenagers opportunities to open up to a trusted therapist about their feelings and experiences at school, at home and in social activities. These sessions are all about:
- Open communication: Communication is one of the most vital aspects of therapy for teenage depression, since they may feel like they can’t discuss their thoughts openly with others in their day-to-day lives. During teen depression therapy, your child can discuss their depressive thoughts with their licensed therapist and begin exploring the deeper roots of these feelings.
- Finding the root cause of depression: Exploring the possibilities of where their depression comes from allows for a more directed approach to healthy habits and mental health treatments that fit their goal for happiness.
- Building problem-solving skills: Teen therapy aims to provide the tools each child needs to maintain a healthy relationship with their mental health and feel empowered through higher self-esteem and problem-solving skills.
Counseling Steps That Lead to Healing
A fresh perspective on life can offer a more positive outlook for children and teens with depression or anxiety as they think of the future. Therapy for these common symptoms that can influence negative thoughts can lead to chances for growing and developing problem-solving skills in productive ways to combat depression.
All it takes is a few steps that encourage your child to grow mentally and build their confidence toward a bright future. Take a look at the following goals in kids’ therapy for depression that can benefit your child’s outlook on life, one step at a time.
As a child struggles with depressive thoughts, they tend to avoid situations that make them feel worse. As they avoid uncomfortable situations, feelings of incompetence and worthlessness increase. The negative feedback in their mind becomes a vicious cycle of depressive and anxious thoughts, falsely confirmed by the external pressures mounting around them.
Addressing anxiety and depression simultaneously helps break the cycle. It’s essential for children to feel validated when facing long-standing negative thoughts. This problem may have been going on for years, unaddressed.
In therapy, we will address the thoughts and behaviors that continue to have devastating effects on their lives by understanding their origin and how they manifest in daily situations. Then, we will discover how to diminish their importance and increase positive feedback and action to move forward.
It can feel challenging to clean up the mess of negative emotions swimming inside one’s mind when they’ve been there for so long. Many children find it easier to let it all go and sit comfortably in a mess.
Once we start picking things apart, we recognize how negative thoughts arise, what keeps them relevant and positive attributes that can take priority. Once we begin to bring order to their mind, we can start to form a plan to bring positive thoughts to the surface.
Once some order is restored, a child can begin to understand the importance of prioritizing positive thoughts and emotions. They begin to understand that negative thoughts bring them deeper into despair, and positive thoughts move them closer to what they want.
A child living with depression does not know what it feels like to be whole and complete. As things become clearer, negativity, sadness and depression become undesirable and obsolete. Instead, they have a vision for the future, which looks more optimistic than depressive symptoms tell them otherwise.
Depression may have been living in your child for quite some time, making itself relevant. However, its foothold can be strengthened with supportive counseling. Once we can give a name to depressive thoughts, we can discover how to make them less relevant for your child.
In depression treatment, we will discover your child’s strengths that will help them defeat depression’s reign. And anytime the thoughts creep in, we will challenge them by successfully recognizing all the steps they take toward getting their life to a positive and fulfilling place.
Courageous Kids Counseling’s Approach
At Courageous Kids Counseling, we take a more direct approach to child therapy, giving kids and families the education and tools they need from the first session. We emphasize the mind-body connection and start by teaching how to recognize and address signs of depression. We want your family to feel supported every step of the way and encourage you to contact us outside of therapy sessions if you need additional support.
We offer a lot of flexibility in how sessions are scheduled and conducted. Therapists might break appointments up based on your child’s needs. For example, they might spend 30 minutes with your child and 15 minutes with you, or set aside the full session time with your child and schedule a separate call with you. Either way, our top priority is creating a supportive space for your child to open up and work through any challenges they may be facing.
Benefits of Therapy for Kids
Therapy can benefit kids in many ways:
- Process emotions: Therapy can help kids understand and process their feelings so they can navigate life more easily. We will work together to unpack emotions and use tools to face obstacles. Specifically, we can help them manage sadness, anger, stress, low self-esteem, worry, and grief.
- Improving mood and reducing symptoms: Therapy can help your child identify and challenge negative thought patterns, helping them work through symptoms and feel better.
- Learning communication skills: In therapy, your child will learn to communicate better. We help them understand helpful words to describe their feelings and how they affect behavior.
- Develop healthy coping skills: Your child will learn to manage strong feelings for the future. We’ll help them practice what they learn by playing games and teaching them self-control, patience and listening skills.
Most importantly, therapy gives your child the tools to recognize when obstacles are too large to face on their own. They’ll know when to turn to you, the parent, for support and manage feelings more healthily.
Teen and Kids’ Therapy for Depression in New York
Reach new heights for your child’s happiness and confidence at Courageous Kids Counseling. In our work together, we will uncover what’s holding your child back in worry and despair and how we can help them move toward a place of happiness and fulfillment. We have convenient online sessions to make them feel as comfortable as possible during each meeting time to progress toward a future of positive mental health.
At Courageous Kids Counseling’s child and teen counseling, we value the importance of empowering strong family bonds so your child can discuss their thoughts outside each session with you or another loved one. We are happy to take calls outside of your child’s appointments to address any of their symptoms and make sure their next session is productive toward new goals for their mental health.
Schedule a child therapy appointment today to begin the road to happiness for your loved one.
Meet Our Team
Erica Smuckler
Licensed Clinical Social Worker
Owner & Clinical Director
Specializing In
TraumaDepressionAnxiety
