Counseling and Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents: Historical Developmental, Integrative, and Effectiveness Perspectives

The psychological treatment of children’s problems is the focus of several professions and is carried out in many settings and situations. Although theoretical viewpoints are wide-ranging and essentially rooted in adult-based theories, the child or adolescent presents a unique challenge to the child mental health worker. Children are not simply little adults. Their treatment cannot be viewed as scaled-down adult therapy; their developmental stages, environments, reasons for entering therapy, and other relevant factors necessitate a different, if not creative, approach to therapy. The child/adolescent therapist must have an expanded knowledge base of the human condition and a different perspective of what constitutes therapy or counseling. This book is about psychotherapy and mental health counseling with children and adolescents. It brings together in a comparative format the major theoretical views of psychological treatment of children and highlights major issues in the area. A number of concerns, however, cut across the theories and are relevant to any provision of mental health services to children. This introductory chapter describes some of these issues: Historical perspectives, the mental health needs of children and adolescents and the need for services, developmental issues, the adolescent phase, the unique aspects of child and adolescent therapy, psychotherapy with adolescents, a multimodal view of treatment, practitioner concerns and patterns of practice, and research/efficacy issues are discussed. Throughout this chapter, the terms counseling and psychotherapy are used interchangeably.