Child
Art Therapy

Art Therapy

Overview

Art therapy utilizes creativity to provide a voice to your child’s thoughts, feelings, and overall disposition. Visual and symbolic expression engage their mind and body distinct from verbal communication. Sensory, perceptual, and symbolic opportunities can help your child with receptive and expressive communication, which can be difficult to express through language.

The enterprise of creativity is essential to the development of a healthy mind, body, and spirit. Creativity development and creative expression not only provide essential components of flexible and adaptive thinking but nourish the spirit and nurture healthy self-esteem through an embodied, sensory experience. Unlike other forms of therapy, expressive arts provide a meeting ground and landscape that join their inner and outer worlds. It gives visual form and organization to an inner kaleidoscope of complex experiences, impulses, and feelings that can be too overwhelming or elusive to vocalize. The benefits are many, including that your child will learn about themselves implicitly in the artmaking process through developing mastery and the confidence that they are effective and unique in their expression. Art can also offer opportunities for reflection and analysis. How your child relates to art is indicative of how they relate not only to themselves, but also to others and the world. Artmaking is rich with symbolism and relational information that can serve as a powerful component to treatment.

Your child does not have to be artistic; of importance is the process of creative expression rather than the end product. Utilizing various types of artistic expression is encouraged, including paints, pastels, pencils, clay, collage, and various papers and canvases, depending on treatment goals.