Do You Need A Therapist?

If you have fostered children or adopted a child--even privately, you may have had to take them to a LOT of therapy sessions. I have to admit though, the therapy sessions we took our kids to didn't seem to do much good--for them. For me--well that was another story! So what about therapy? I'd like to share our experiences and offer a bit of an alternative view when it comes to children and talk therapy.

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Our kids had a lot of appointments. Probably fewer than most though, since they didn’t have a lot of serious health issues like many children coming out of foster care. They had talk therapy sessions with a child psychologist on a regular basis and there was a play therapist that came to our house.

Our experiences were not negative with the therapists themselves and in fact, the play therapist was an incredible person who helped me, as the mom, much more than anything we did as a family or that she did with the kids. Although I would say play therapy is much more beneficial than talk therapy.

Talk therapy for a child seems to me to be rather silly. Therapists never see the true behaviors that you are seeing at home so there is not an opportunity to speak to those behaviors. Children seldom express themselves well through words and are typically not triggered in that sterile environment.

Play therapy can be beneficial because it involves motor memory and expressing and communicating in a way that a child understands. That said, for us, we were doing all the things the play therapist brought to us already. But even with that, the relationship between a therapist and child is temporary and the child knows it. So they can usually hold it together and behave for an hour session, which means most things never get addressed.

I think it would be much better if the foster care system would pay for talk therapy for the PARENTS rather than the kids. Because the parents are the true therapists. They are the ones in the trenches, dealing with tantrums, violence and defiance every day in the home. They have so much stress and secondary PTSD because of the way their kids are responding to the world—especially in close relationships.

So yes. I think therapy can be very helpful. For the parents. As far as kids are concerned, if you are able to help a parent with THEIR emotions and baggage, that will do more for the children than 100 hours of talk therapy for a kid that is a master at saying what people want to hear in a therapy session—especially once they are a little older.

That is just my two cents. What do you think?