For Children
Psychotherapy can be adapted in ways that are accessible and developmentally appropriate for children. It is generally held to be one part of an effective strategy for some purposes and not for others. These are four purposes that are generally considered inappropriate or pointless reasons for placing a child in psychotherapy:
- to determine why a child originally began misbehaving,
- to improve the child's self-esteem,
- to make up for inconsistent parenting, and
- to make the child capable of coping with a parent's drug addiction, interpersonal relationships, or other serious dysfunction.
In addition to therapy for the child, or even instead of it, children may benefit if their parents speak to a therapist, take parenting classes, attend grief counseling, or take other actions to resolve stressful situations that affect the child.
Read more about this topic: Psychotherapists
Famous quotes containing the word children:
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“Certainly, young children can begin to practice making letters and numbers and solving problems, but this should be done without workbooks. Young children need to learn initiative, autonomy, industry, and competence before they learn that answers can be right or wrong.”
—David Elkind (20th century)