I was so excited to have interviewed Dr. Willa Marquis, a San Diego OCD Treatment specialist to share her expertise in the diagnosis and treatment of OCD.

Dr. Willa Marquis is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in child and adolescent anxiety and OCD treatment.

You find yourself in an unexpected place feeling unprepared. Unprepared to deal with it all and it’s a lot. You’re especially concerned about your children, so now you’re researching grief counseling for kids.

San Diego North County is a great place to raise kids. So many wonderful opportunities. Award-winning schools, beaches, hiking trails, and lots of near-perfect weather. While San Marcos may be known as a family-friendly community within North County, not all the kids here are happy and relaxed.

If you have ever been to therapy yourself, you know it can take some time to find the “right” therapist. The truth is it can be even harder to find the right therapist for a child struggling with anxiety. There are several reasons, but here are the basic ones.

There are a lot of therapists who provide child therapy. You’ve asked friends and family for referrals. You looked at therapist directories and read websites. Mind-boggled. Check.

You narrowed down your search. It looks like most therapists offer a consultation. How do you figure out what to ask? How do you make a decision?

Providing children opportunities to make decisions, without parent involvement builds decision-making muscles. With my training in Art Therapy, I often incorporate artmaking into child therapy and family therapy sessions. I find that art-making provides opportunities for children to express their self and communicate what they think and feel.

If you are experiencing a loss, your grief may feel unbearable. Yet each day you do your best to care for your children. It may be a loss that affects them too, and they “Don’t want to talk about it”. It may be that they can’t talk about it.

I know if you’re searching for grief counseling for children or for yourself, your family is not fine. You’re experiencing something you didn’t predict, that has swept over your entire family. Now the waves keep coming.

As you grieve fun things feel meaningless. You watch your children, who are also going through this loss. Sometimes they are playing like nothing has changed. At other times they’re not themselves and you know they’ve been impacted. 

Homeschooling lends itself to more outside-the-box thinking. Homeschool parents have a unique opportunity to offer a much wider range of creative experiences and art materials even without art experience and a limited budget.

As I have provided therapy for kids, many have wrestled with anxiety, for various reasons. It's not uncommon for kids to have worries about their own safety. They also worry that something bad will happen to their parents. During the pandemic, these fears heightened for many children.

As a therapist who provides therapy for children, here are three myths that I’ve encountered that people sometimes believe about therapy for kids. These myths contribute to families not getting help. They also add to the stigma around mental health treatment.       

San Diego is a great place to live. On one hand, it has this easy-going feeling, with sunshine and sandy beaches, but there are also a lot of pressures that go with living in Southern California. Raising kids and the whole parenting thing gets complicated. In fact, lately, you have been considering therapy for your child.

Stigmas persist about getting help from a counselor or mental health therapist. And when it’s your kid who needs child therapy for anxiety, it’s not something proudly posted on social media.

As a therapist who works with children, I often use Art Therapy with kids who struggle with anxiety. I offer a variety of materials when my clients are creating art in a therapy session but thought I would take an opportunity to share some of my favorite art supplies that I find helpful.

Talking to children about participating in therapy is like many other things we have to speak to our children about. Kids often take their cues from adults. If we present therapy as a place where a child must talk to a therapist, a child can feel a tremendous amount of pressure to not only please their parent but also to talk to a complete stranger about something that is already difficult to put into words. If we are tentative and worried when we talk about therapy, which can be natural because we have concerns about our child, he or she may believe there is something to worry about. If we appear to be evading questions, they may feel we are hiding something from them.

Yes, you read that right…ways you can increase your child’s anxiety. I really wish when my children were younger someone would have told me that as a parent I may be at times my child’s greatest source of anxiety.

I’m going to start with the trap. “Do you like it?” This is the common question that children ask adults, especially parents, as they excitedly show you their latest drawing or painting. As parents, we often automatically answer, “Yes, of course, I like it”. “That’s so beautiful!”.

When I think of children who are quieter, I think about clients in the past and how art therapy helped them. While I cannot tell you their confidential stories, or share pictures of their artwork, their images created in art therapy still come to my memory. Powerful images.