(415) 505-4048

Flood Building

870 Market Street, Suite 753

San Francisco, CA  94102

drcharles@hushmail.com

License #PSY17926

Ages: Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers

Parenting can be fulfilling, enjoyable, and heartening. But, parenting can also be exhausting, frustrating, and boring, Sometimes parents need reassurances that a range of feelings are okay. At other times, the balance feels too heavily weighted in the challenges or you just don’t know how to satisfy or help your child. Child-Parent Psychotherapy can help.

We’ll meet in your home or in my office with your child to understand your relationship. While we play with your child together, we’ll be looking closely at your child to understand his or her messages to you and to uncover needs or difficulties that may not seem immediately apparent. We’ll discuss your lives together and how that is influenced by your own experiences as a parent and as a child. We’ll work on developing new patterns and routines with your child.

This service is usually geared toward children five and under although there are exceptions such as children who have autism spectrum disorders.

Child-Parent & Infant-Parent Psychotherapy

Ages: Preschoolers, Elementary School Students

Children are not often able to express their feelings verbally. Individual play therapy offers a medium to explore traumas, fears, losses and separations, and general worries. Through play and your child’s imagination, I will learn about what’s on your child’s mind. I may speak directly with your child to identify what I understand about them, but more often I will name concerns and offer solutions within the context of play.

Play can be a powerfully expressive metaphor for a child’s fears allowing them to “name” dilemmas that even an adult might have difficulty saying out loud. I’ll work with your child to resolve internal conflicts, better understand the world around them, and develop skills for building peer and adult-child relationships.

Usually, preschool age children through elementary school children, benefit from this mode of therapy. It affords a child some freedom from a parent to explore, but the parent is always made aware of general themes and concerns, safety issues, and progress.

Child Play Therapy

Sometimes a child struggles across settings or in one particular setting. Because teachers and caregivers are important contributors to a child’s development, it’s usually important to include them. For many clients, I observe the child in their school or daycare environments and help the staff to understand how to best respond to your child. I have extensive experience consulting to staff from many different types of children’s programs and schools – helping them understand, accept and accommodate your child. I have written about this work in books and articles.

Consultation with Teachers & Caregivers

I am guided by the idea that children develop in relationships: parents and family, caregivers and teachers, and peers. Depending on your child’s needs, developmental age, and supporting relationships, there are several ways we can work together. Together, we’ll determine who to include and the best approach of those described below.

Contributors to a child’s distress can vary:

1. ๏Trauma (witnessing or experiencing violence; separations and loss: death, divorce, separations);
   

2. ๏individual Differences (every child comes into the world with particular sensitivities and abilities, i.e. autism, sensory integration difficulties, hard to soothe, etc.); and
   

3. ๏Parent-child struggles to understand each other.
   

I can help sort out which and what combination of these factors have affected your family, help your child build new strengths and resolve difficulties, and help you (and your child’s other caregivers and teachers) understand how to best help your child.

I have worked with children with a range of diagnoses: attachment disorders, depression, anxiety, ADHD, PTSD, separation anxiety, social and school phobias, autistic spectrum disorders, failure to thrive, and disorders of infancy and early childhood, among others.

Services for Children & Families