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:
“The “universal moments” of child rearing are in fact nothing less than a confrontation with the most basic problems of living in society: a facing through one’s children of all the conflicts inherent in human relationships, a clarification of issues that were unresolved in one’s own growing up. The experience of child rearing not only can strengthen one as an individual but also presents the opportunity to shape human relationships of the future.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“A man of sense and energy, the late head of the Farm School in Boston Harbor, said to me, “I want none of your good boys,Mgive me the bad ones.” And this is the reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared, and think they are going to die.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)