From birth to old age, humans are constantly developing, adapting, and changing to fit our environmental demands and our needs. When working with children, it helps to keep the development stages a needs in mind. Doing so will help you interpret each child’s behavior more accurately and will help you educate parents on how they can help meet a child’s needs.

Working with children and families requires that providers stay up-to-date on the evolving science of child development and child psychology, in addition to cultural and social trends that impact the lives of our patient families. In addition, patients present with an array of belief systems, medical conditions, and a variety of other factors that require providers to keep themselves well informed.

Our patients’ experience of the world, life, and even their own families are largely influenced by the culture around them. Savvy clinicians stay informed, curious, and open to understanding new cultures and new ways of relating to and seeing our patients’ authentic, lived experience of the world.

Children look to their parents to help identify danger and for guidance in understanding and interpreting events in the world. Parents are often symbols of security and safety, but sometimes traumatic events, parents’ mental health struggles, chronic stress, poverty, prejudice, and many other factors influence the quality and stability of parent-child relationships. In working with children, we are almost always working to strengthen parent-child bonds.

Consider the bigger picture(s), and how a child’s specific struggles fit into the larger context of their lives…. The family system; cultural context;  developmental stages; the impact of other family members, parents, siblings; and the impact on academic learning, relationship building, etc.

Many research studies point to the therapeutic alliance as a factor that continues to have a large impact, even larger than the type of treatment utilized by the counselor. Establishing a strong alliance is key to building trust and successful implementation of any intervention with children and their parents.

Think out of the box! One of the best parts of working with kids is that it challenges you to be creative, not just in your interventions, but also in the way you explain and relay concepts, the way you teach new skills, and the way you help parents see old behaviors in new ways.

Therapy should never be cookie cutter. All people, families, and stories are different and deserve to be heard. One difficulty for developing counselors is learning to recognize familiar patterns when working with patients, but that also means recognizing when patient families don’t fit the patterns and formulations that worked well with previous patient families.  Getting in touch with the individual experience of patient struggles helps ensure we don’t overapply patterns but instead we look at each case like its new.

Counseling is often a collaborative process where we identify and accept patients’ experiences, and in combination with our own knowledge-base and personal experience, we collaborate with patient families in making lasting life changes.

Counseling is a journey for most patients and families. It’s a journey that we often take with them, but not as the main player or hero in the story, Counselors are more knowledgeable guides. It’s not our story, but we can help them along the way as they create their own story.

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