Children & adolescents

Children I work with often get labelled with challenging behaviour….

This is usually described as children having anxiety - leading to meltdowns. What comes out in therapy are the difficulties the child is unable to communicate or process. These issues can be emotion regulation, resilience, friendships, learning environment, overwhelming activities, self-care, family dynamics, health/wellbeing and neurodiversity.

So, what lies under the label of anxiety is actually a series of behaviours that are challenging to those around the child. These difficulties are common themes of childhood development, so accessing therapy at an early age can be really beneficial to help bring a child and associated family members back on track. Indeed, much of the child therapy I do involves working with parents and schools to support the child holistically.

Challenging behaviour may also be present through more complex presentations such as trauma from bullying, racism, illness, injury, bereavement, family issues/incarceration, war, natural disasters and intergenerational trauma. These aspects can still be worked with but require more time, reflective approaches and the potential for different professional involvement as the child develops.

Adolescents often have similar challenges as above which have not been processed and therefore come back in different forms to be worked on again. Teenagers in therapy often present with self-harm, suicidal ideation, confusion around identity, including gender, sexuality and relationship diversity, fitting in at school, lack of friends, pressure to succeed, exam stress and lack of motivation or ideas about what to do in life.

It is worth noting here that Gillick competence is a legal principle for assessing a child's capacity to consent to therapy, and it can apply to anyone under the age of 16. For 16–17-year-olds, they are legally presumed to have the capacity to consent to their own treatment, similar to adults. In these cases, I do explore with my clients who they could share their experience of therapy with and be curious about their current desire for it to be unknown.

If you’d like to arrange therapy for your child or book a parent consultation to learn how to manage these difficulties, please email me now.

 To understand a bit more about how I work, you can find details in my Approach section, as well as some case studies in my Journal, and linked to throughout my site, as I publish them.