Find Ways to Help
Your Child Recover

Concerned about how your child is coping after an injury? There are helpful treatments. These resources will show you how to find a child therapist or other professional help for your child.

After your child’s injury, if you’re concerned or asking yourself questions like, “does my child need counseling?”, the resources on this page can help you get answers.

Taking care of yourself: Re-experiencing

• Talk with friends or family about your own experiences and feelings about your child's injury.
• Help yourself deal with overwhelming or troubling thoughts by learning how to "take a break" from them at times - do something fun, spend time with friends, get busy with other activities.
• If talking with your child about his or her reactions makes you feel upset or worried, it's especially important to find someone who can be a listening ear for you.

Taking care of yourself: Avoidance

After a traumatic event, it makes sense to be on the lookout for danger. Hyper-arousal symptoms are how we keep ourselves safe from things that are truly dangerous.

Avoidance symptoms include taking a break from thinking/talking about a traumatic experience. These are common immediately following an injury but should subside.

After a traumatic event, such as your child’s injury, we often think & talk about it. This is called re-experiencing and is common immediately following the injury.

Recognizing and Managing Pain

Nearly everyone has pain after an injury. For most children, our research has shown that the pain will get a lot better during the first week after getting care for an injury. If the pain gets worse, make sure to talk to your child's doctor.

Head injury is a broad term that describes injuries to the scalp, skull, brain, and tissue and blood vessels in the child’s head. Some head injuries are also called brain injury, or traumatic brain injury (TBI), depending on the extent of the head trauma. Concussion is the most common type of TBI.

For hip, leg, knee, ankle, or foot injuries, your healthcare provider may order crutches to decrease pain, speed recovery, and help with walking. Make sure that a trained healthcare professional fits your child for child-sized crutches and teaches your child how to use them.

Ask your healthcare provider for specific signs and symptoms that should alert you to call them right away. They may include the following: