Children and adolescents today are dealing with many pressures: divorce and family problems, stressed and over-worked parents, school difficulties and academic pressures, peer pressure and bullying, drug and alcohol issues, impact of the media and technology, and in some cases, the added trauma of abuse, serious illness/accidents, or the death of a loved one. Young children have difficulty verbalizing their experience and feelings about what is happening in their lives, and older children and adolescents may be moody and uncommunica-tive, unlikely to trust parents or authority figures with their problems. Instead, children manifest their inability to adapt to the pressures in their lives in the form of behavioral problems such as anxiety and clinginess, sleep disturbances, poor school performance, social withdrawal and moodiness, anger and irritability, inability to focus and hyperactive behavior, or aggression and other socially unacceptable behaviors. 

   The assistance of a caring professional who has the tools to reach children who struggle is sometimes needed to help children make sense of the pressures they are under, to restore self-esteem, and to continue on the path of healthy development. Art therapy offers an ideal intervention with children and young people, because it doesn’t rely on words alone for understanding - understanding of the child’s problems, and helping a child understand and integrate what is happening in his or her life. It is especially helpful in the treatment of children who have been traumatized, because traumatic memories are stored in the brain in a different way from normal memories, and are not easily accessible to verbal recall, yet continue to haunt children in the form of troubling symptoms and disturbed development, if left untreated. As an assessment tool, children’s art expressions give a trained therapist a wealth of information about what is going on in a child’s inner and outer world, even when the situation may seem confusing to both the child and the parent. And as a tool for healing, the creation of art work, and story-telling about the pictures or dramatization of the scenes, under the guidance of a trusted adult, reaches a young person at a level deeper than verbal or behavioral interventions can. Tapping disturbed core emotions, and helping transform them, art therapy can produce lasting changes in the child’s perception of himself and others, and in his problematic behavior.

   Young children are spontaneously creative, and older children and adolescents who may have developed a self-consciousness about their artistic abilities, also quickly warm up to the non-threatening and fun media offered (e.g. magazine photo collage), so no special skills or aptitude are required. Play therapy is offered alongside art interventions, so even the youngest children can benefit. And adolescents, in particular – with their parent’s understanding and cooperation – are offered the confidentiality they need while they build trust and begin to work on better communication with the parent.

“Drawing is more than a doorway to the child’s mental representation of traumatic material. A more complex model proposes that the visual and other perceptual experiences of the event become embedded and transformed in a child’s drawings, serving as an ongoing indicator of the child’s processing and eventual resolution of traumatic events.”