Build Stronger Family Bonds!
Families experience difficulties for a variety of reasons that can stress family bonds and diminish vital communication, such as:
- Transitions such as moving or adding new family members
- Children experiencing emotional challenges or behavioral issues
- Adolescents adjusting to a new phase of life
- Adult children returning home after college
- Having to care for an aging parent
- The challenges associated with creating a new stepfamily
The Center for Couples, Families and Children provides family counseling using the Relationship Enhancement® or Filial Family Therapy approaches, which teach skills that allow family members to communicate more constructively, understand one another more deeply, solve problems more effectively, and build stronger family bonds.
The Center offers family counseling for:
- Parents and young children
- Parents and adolescents
- Parents and adult-children
- Remarried couples with stepchildren
- Stepfamily units including parents and children
- Individual adults focused on step-parenting or stepfamily issues
Relationship Enhancement® Family Counseling
The Center utilizes the research-based and proven effective Relationship Enhancement® (RE) approach to family counseling. The counseling focuses not only on helping families resolve current issues, but also empowers families by teaching skills for improving communication and developing the ability to cooperatively and effectively resolve future family issues and conflicts. RE family counseling is generally appropriate for children 12 or older. For younger children, the Center offers Filial Family Therapy. Please click here for information about the Effectiveness of Relationship Enhancement® Therapy and Filial Family Therapy.
Filial Family Therapy for Parents of Young Children
Filial Family Therapy is an empirically validated family therapy approach in which parents are taught skills that enable them to conduct therapeutic play sessions with their own children under the supervision of a trained therapist. The Filial Therapy approach is generally appropriate for families with children between the ages of 3 and 12. Parents not only learn ways of helping their children overcome current problems, but also learn effective child management techniques and other skills which can be used to prevent future problems from developing. For more information, please visit Counseling for Children, Including Play Therapy.
Family Counseling for Stepfamilies
Stepfamilies have special needs and unique challenges. Relationship Enhancement® counseling for stepfamilies usually begins with couple work, then expands to include children (and sometimes former spouses or extended family). Because each stepfamily situation is unique, plans for resolving each family’s issues are made individually.