In-person in Houston, online across Texas • In-network with Aetna, BCBS, Cigna, UHC/Optum, Tricare, Curative, Oscar • Therapy in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi
Child & Teen
Doctoral-Level Child & Teen Therapy in Houston, TX
Children and adolescents do not communicate as adults do. Children communicate through play and behavior; adolescents through silence, sudden disclosure, or the body. Much of what they feel has not yet found language, and the clinician's task is to help that language arrive without supplying it.
Child and teen therapy in Houston at Real Talk is offered to a limited number of children and adolescents, in English and Spanish, in person and online across Texas. Parents are part of the treatment, and the boundaries around what is shared with them and what remains confidential are established at the outset.
With younger children the work proceeds largely through play, drawing, and the relationship with the clinician. With adolescents it proceeds through talk that respects the privacy that developmental stage requires. We treat behavior as communication and attempt to understand what it communicates and to whom.
We meet with parents at the beginning and at intervals, and we are candid about what we observe, including when the family situation is itself part of what the child is carrying.
Presentations We See
Childhood anxiety, which often presents as somatic complaint, refusal, and rigidity rather than as worry. Adolescent depression, which often presents as irritability and withdrawal. School refusal. Behavioral difficulty confined to one setting, which is itself diagnostically informative. The aftermath of family change, including divorce, relocation, and death. Adolescents contending with identity, including gender and sexuality, and with families struggling to accommodate it. Adolescents requiring outpatient care after hospitalization. And children whose neurodevelopmental differences, including autism, are part of the picture and need to be understood within the treatment rather than referred out of it.
What We Pay Attention To
We pay attention to what the symptom is doing within the family and to whom it is addressed. We attend to what the child cannot say directly and to the developmental tasks that have been interrupted. And we listen for parental anxiety, which children absorb, and for what the parents themselves were not given at that age.
Why Doctoral Training Matters for Children and Teens: Specialized training matters most when a child's difficulties appear across settings and have not responded to standard intervention, when behavior may be masking anxiety, trauma, or a mood disorder, when neurodevelopmental differences such as autism are part of the presentation, and when the family system is itself in distress.
Our clinical director reads every inquiry and recommends a clinician within minutes on weekdays, hours on weekends.
What ages do you see?
Generally school age through adolescence. Write to us about your child and the clinical director will tell you whether we are the right setting or who is.
Will I know what my child says in therapy?
You will know how the treatment is progressing and anything that concerns safety. The content of sessions is protected so that the child can use them.
Do you diagnose ADHD or autism?
We work clinically with both. We do not conduct formal testing in children and teens.
Jonathan Haidt. End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.
The Atlantic, 2024. Read here.
David Robson. The Biggest Myths of the Teenage Brain.
BBC, 2022. Read here.
From Our Journal
The Fear of Being Misunderstood.