Child Psychology

How do I know if I need to consult with a child psychologist?

Overview

Does your child struggle with any of the following?

  • Difficulties in managing emotions such as sadness, hurts, worries, fears, or anger
  • Excessive fear and unwillingness to explore his or her environment
  • Emotional avoidance with minimal to little experienced or expressed emotion
  • Self-criticalness, excessive perfectionism, and/or low self-esteem
  • Unrelenting negative thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and standards about self and others
  • Frequent or explosive anger, temper tantrums, aggression, or bullying behaviour
  • Disruptiveness, defiance, or argumentativeness at home or school
  • Self-destructive, harmful, or risky behaviours (e.g., self-harm, substance use, eating disordered-behaviour)
  • Difficulty with establishing age-appropriate independence or meeting developmental milestones
  • Problems experienced in the development of personal and social identities (e.g., gender identity, sexual identity)
  • A lack of interest in social relationships or social withdrawal
  • Problems in creating or maintaining relationships with parents, siblings, peers, or teachers
  • Difficulties in abiding by family and social rules
  • Trouble initiating or completing household chores or schoolwork
  • Concerns related to attention, concentration, learning, and impulsivity
  • Difficulties adapting to transitions (e.g., changes in neighbourhood and school, new blended family and step-parenting relationships)
  • Psychological issues related to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, physical or emotional neglect, or bullying
  • Significant and abrupt changes in academic, intellectual, emotional and social functioning

Do you or your partner or co-parent struggle with any of the following?

  • Difficulties responding and adapting to the changing developmental needs of your child
  • Conflicts related to developing a unified, cohesive parenting style and strategy
  • Choosing appropriate and effective methods of discipline and managing differences in views on child discipline
  • Finding consistency in your emotional accessibility and availability to your child
  • Uncertainty about how to improve attachment and appropriate emotional expression between your child and other family members
  • Providing appropriate structure, routine, guidance and mentoring without being overly controlling
  • Being non-constructively critical and perfectionistic with your child
  • Having overly high standards or unrealistic expectations that are unachievable by your child
  • Defining appropriate limits and boundaries in your relationship with your child (e.g., parent-to-child, couple-to-children)
  • Navigating through parenting differences related to opposing expectations, values, beliefs, and ideals
  • Providing nurturance, affection, warmth, physical, or emotional care
  • Finding time to play with and provide your child with positive attention
  • Dealing with a child’s difficult behaviours and emotional reactions and their impact on your parenting, couple, and family relationships
  • Managing boundaries related to step-parenting and a blended family
  • Talking to children about separation, divorce, and death in a developmentally-appropriate manner
  • Effectively dealing with the emotional aftermath of separation and divorce to help your child adaptively cope
  • Developing effective co-parenting strategies to minimize the impact of separation or divorce on children
  • How to talk to your children about separation or divorce

Help Is Available

If you said yes to any of the above, you might consider meeting with one of the highly trained mental health professionals in the Child Psychology Treatment Service at CFIR. Our mental health professionals can support you to address your and your loved ones’ concerns, issues or struggles.

Help is available right now for you and your loved ones. We also offer video-based appointments to fit our clients’ needs.

How do we help you with the difficulties experienced by your child?

We will:

  • Provide you and your loved ones with a confidential, compassionate, and caring therapeutic relationship to help you address most distressing thoughts, emotional reactions, behaviours and relationship difficulties
  • Spend the time to truly understand your concerns and the complexity of the relationships between you and your children
  • Offer you a comprehensive, individually-tailored assessment of your child to help develop a personalized treatment plan
  • Collaboratively set treatment goals with you to ensure that your treatment is most relevant to your child
  • Use relevant scientific, evidence-based treatments to help your child achieve your goals, including: Acceptance and Commitment, Cognitive-Behavioural, Dialectical Behavioural, Emotion-Focused, Interpersonal, Mindfulness, Psychodynamic-Mentalization-Attachment-based, Solution-Focused and Systems approaches
  • Offer short, medium or long-term treatment options based on your child’s unique needs and concerns
  • Identify referrals to other professionals as needed

Find A Therapist

We have many mental health therapists at each of our locations who offer this service. Please select a location below to see a list: