Child Counseling Services

Grow provides your child with a comfortable, welcoming, and safe space to discuss their (and your) concerns and to open themselves up to new ways of learning and being. Our team is comprised of compassionate and skilled therapists with an interest and expertise in child therapy work. We offer evidence and skills-based solutions for your child’s challenges in addition to validation, acceptance, and support of where they are today. Given the importance of involving caregivers in therapy work, we will collaborate with you to learn about your child and develop a therapy treatment plan that will support your child and move them towards the change you would like to see.

In their child therapy work, your Grow therapist will help your child identify the most challenging parts of their life; be it school stress or pressure, having a hard time paying attention, managing extracurriculars, social difficulties, internal distress, or relationship challenges with their caregivers. Whether using techniques from child anxiety therapy, child depression therapy, or child dialectical behavior therapy including mindfulness and emotion regulation training, our therapists will help your child learn more about their current experience and move them to a higher level of functioning. Specified to the needs of every client, our program will teach your child how to better regulate their emotions, how to choose to engage in the most effective behaviors they can, and how to relax when wanted or needed. Our therapists will provide your child with skills they can use to socialize in a more productive way, and will also help them learn to identify and work towards their goals.

Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and mindfulness-based approaches, we will help your child decrease the use of unproductive behaviors, troublesome emotions, and unhelpful thoughts. As your child becomes more mindful of their own experience, they will learn to focus their attention more effectively, identify and regulate their own emotions more skillfully, decrease confusion about themselves, and create and maintain healthier relationships with family, friends, and others.

In child therapy sessions, your child and their therapist will also focus on your child’s strengths- what they excel in, what they are interested in, and what they enjoy. We can then teach your child specific skills that they will be able to grasp, practice, and apply to multiple environments and areas in their life. Relying on your child’s strengths and reinforcing your child for making an effective change will help motivate them to continue trying new, more skillful ways of being.

As clinicians, with years of child therapy experience in DuPage County, understand the challenges faced by your child and are prepared to help them succeed. Regardless of their current obstacles or stumbling blocks- emotion dysregulation, difficulties in social situations, trouble in school or at home, or just frustration about how difficult it can sometimes be to be a kid in this day and age – with a supportive therapeutic relationship at Grow it is possible to make important and lasting improvements.

Is my child’s behavior normal? This is a common question that parents ask themselves when they have concerns about their child’s behavior(s). The truth is, based on age or developmental stage, some behaviors are typical and normative and others are not. For example, as children get old enough to understand how to lie, that behavior may be normal for them. When these are of the ‘white lie’ variety, these are not typically problematic. However, if over time, lying becomes more habitual or problematic, it can become a target behavior to work on in therapy. Another common example is a child not listening to parents, which can be normal at particular ages or developmental stages. However, depending on the child’s age, the extent of the behavior, and the impact it may have, this behavior may not be in line with what is typical of a child that age. In child therapy, your therapist can help you and your child assess what behaviors may be problematic and can identify useful tools to change or manage the behavior if needed.