Existential Therapy for Kids?

I’ve had parents ask some version of, “So, if you work from an existential approach… how can that work for kids?”

It’s a fair question. The word existential can sound abstract, philosophical, and very adult. It can bring to mind a therapist sitting across from someone asking big questions about the meaning of life.

But existential counselling with children doesn’t mean asking a seven-year-old to contemplate the meaning of their existence. It means taking seriously the fact that children are already experiencing the world in meaningful, complicated, and deeply human ways, while recognizing that they experience and communicate their worlds in developmentally different ways.

So counselling might look like drawing, playing a game, building a world in a sand tray, talking about a friendship at school, creating characters, noticing what happens in the body, sitting quietly together, laughing, or following a completely unexpected train of thought.

The tools may change, but the underlying approach stays the same: I want to understand this child’s experience from their perspective.

Beginning with the child’s lived experience

The phenomenological part of my work means that I want to understand what something is like for this particular child, rather than immediately deciding what their behaviour means.

Take a child who is struggling to go to school. We might call it anxiety, avoidance, separation difficulties, or a behavioural issue. Those words can sometimes be helpful, but they don’t necessarily tell us what the experience is actually like for the child.

What is Sunday night like when they know school is coming? What happens when they walk through the school doors? What do they notice in their body? Where do they feel comfortable? Where do they feel small? What are they worried might happen? And we don’t necessarily have to ask those questions directly. We might draw the school. We might build it. We might make up a story about a character who doesn’t want to go. We might play. Or we might simply notice where the child’s attention goes.

The child is not a problem to be solved

Children usually come to counselling because an adult is worried about something. Maybe they’re having big feelings, struggling at school, fighting with siblings, withdrawing, having trouble sleeping, or having a hard time managing something that feels overwhelming.

Of course, we want to help with those things. But I don’t want counselling to become another place where a child feels like they are the problem.

Instead of only asking, “How do we get this behaviour to stop?”, I also want to wonder, “What might this behaviour be telling us about this child’s experience?”

Sometimes children communicate through behaviour long before they have the words to explain what’s happening inside.

Play is part of the therapy

For children, play is often one of the ways they make sense of their world and communicate things they might not know how to say directly.

A child might create a tiny character who has to protect an entire castle from enormous monsters. I don’t necessarily need to figure out what the monster “represents.” I might just say,

“That little guy has a really big job.”

And then wait.

Maybe the child shrugs and keeps playing. Maybe they laugh. Or maybe they say, “Yeah. Nobody else is going to do it.”

And suddenly, we might be talking about something that matters.

The play isn’t something we have to get through before we can get to the “real therapy.” The play is part of the therapy. It is one of the ways a child can show us their world.

Making room for agency

One of the things I notice when I ask my child clients what they like most about counselling is how often they mention being able to play and being able to choose. They like getting to choose what we do, which game we play, where they sit, or whether they want to draw or talk. Those choices might seem small, but children spend a lot of their lives having adults make decisions for them. Adults decide when they wake up, where they go, when they go to school, what the rules are, and often even whether they come to counselling in the first place.

Of course, children need boundaries and adults need to provide guidance. But counselling can also be a place where a child gets to experience some choice. What do you want to do first? Do you want to draw this or talk about it? Do you want your parent to stay for this part? What do you think? These little moments can communicate: Your experience matters. You have preferences. You can make choices. You can listen to yourself.

It’s about how we meet the child

Existential and phenomenological counselling with children isn’t really about having the right activity or therapeutic tool. It’s about how I meet the child. I bring my clinical knowledge, developmental understanding, and responsibility as an adult into the room. But I also try not to assume that I already know who this child is or what their experience means. I want to be curious. You are already a whole person. Your experience matters. You can show me what it is like to be you. From there, we might use play, art, stories, movement, games, conversation, body awareness, or whatever else helps the child express and explore their experience.

Let’s get curious about your world together.