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 children despise their parents until the age of 40, when they suddenly become just like them—thus preserving the system.”
—Quentin Crewe (20th century)
“Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)