Being a Therapist for Your Own Child- A New Approach

Have you ever thought to yourself if you could be your own child’s therapist?

That if only you knew how to manage all your child’s problems at home and school?

Well, the most probable answer would be “Yes”.

Because it is quite obvious for the parents and the child to face plenty of difficulties as part of growing up. And it is not always easy to convince everyone to seek a child therapist.

Most of us would have heard comments and complaints like “I am afraid of dogs”, “I don’t want to sleep alone because I get nightmares”, “My child throws severe temper tantrums often” and so on.

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These are some of the common problems most of the kids often face.

So, How Do We Tackle these Issues on Our Own?

Here’s the drill.

A popular Finnish psychotherapist and a psychiatrist, Dr. Ben Furman, has introduced a completely unique and fun way of dealing with difficulties.

That commonly occur to children or adolescents.

The approach is called ‘Kids’ Skills’.

It has a major emphasis on learning a skill than tackling a problem.

This innovative approach follows the foundations of solution-focused method which focuses on solutions rather than problems.

As I mentioned, one of the key factors of Kid’s skills approach lies not in identifying the problem. But in learning the skill to resolve the difficulty.

So, how do our children learn a skill which would help them overcome their problem behaviours or psychological issues?

Dr. Furman puts forth fifteen steps in his kid’s skills approach.

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All the steps are quite comprehensive and practically easy and applicable on kids.

However, explaining each of the steps in detail is beyond the scope of this article.

So let me briefly illustrate the overall method with an example.

Master Sam bites his nail often.

His parents and teachers have addressed the issue but he was unable to change the behaviour.

How Do We Use our Kid’s Skill Method in This Situation?

The first and foremost step is to begin a conversation with the child mentioning about the random skills he has acquired.

Say, being able to sleep in his room alone.

You would be surprised to see that the kids are quite interested while talking about the skills they have rather than mentioning their problems.

Then, you introduce the idea of learning a new skill.

Or probably you could ask your child what skill he or she must learn at this point to be better.

Once the skill at point is identified, you discuss the importance of that skill with the child.

You ask them how they are going to benefit from this skill, what good it does to them and the people around them etc.

During this stage, you would be able to build confidence in your child.

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Next few steps are concerned with making the skill learning a fun process.

So you ask the child to name the skill. Say, in this example, Sam named his skill as “growing the nails skill”.

This gives them a sense of authority over the skill they learn.

Then you ask him or her that who is going to help them to learn the skill.

So the child might say a few names who could be their ‘supporters’.

Along with that you could ask your child to pick up a ‘power creature’ or ‘an animal’ that they think would be able to help them learn the skill.

Children surely will come up with much more imaginative things than what you can guess.

Once these steps are covered, we move on to the most interesting part of the kids skills steps, ‘planning the celebration’ with the kids.

We all know that kids are so fond of celebrations.

So telling the kids that they are going to have a celebration at the end of the learning, the task get really exciting for them.

While moving on to the final few stages, you tell your child to practice the skills until it is learned well.

You also ask them how they would like to be reminded when they forget the skill.

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In addition, to strengthen their skill and their sense of responsibility over the skill, you can ask the child to teach it to others as well.

This seriously reinforces the newly-acquired skills and the learning process of the child.

So, next time you come across your child’s difficulties and usual tantrums, you know what to do. Right?

To dwell in more about the kid’s skills, you can freely download the ‘Kids’ skill’ application on your phone or visit Dr. Furman’s website.