Child and adolescent counselling is a counselling service that seeks to prevent the onset or worsening of problems that can harm children’s and adolescents’ development, adjustment, and social, emotional and cognitive health.
Counselling gives a child or adolescent a safe setting in which to express their adjustment difficulties or emotional turmoil, and to begin finding solutions to them.
Many different specialist methods and techniques are used in counselling children and adolescents.
With children, and depending on the child’s age and the problem, a range of methods may be used, such as talking with the child, and interviews with the parents, the teacher or the school counsellor. Because language is still developing in preschool children, and sometimes in the early school years too, specialists also use methods that rely less on words, such as observing the child’s spontaneous play (play therapy), planned role-play, drama therapy, looking at the child’s drawings and the stories they make up about them, and other ways of giving the child room to express their thoughts and feelings about themselves and others freely. The main aim of counselling with a child is to help them speak more effectively than before about their needs and fears, and have what they want answered.
Because parents and others in a parenting role (carers) play a vital part in recognising a child’s needs, frustrations and fears, and in meeting those needs and removing problems and threats, their presence and involvement in counselling is essential. Sometimes resolving a child’s problems requires a change in the parents’ behaviour, or even treatment of their own emotional difficulties, and the counsellor should attend to this as part of helping the child.
Because adolescents have more developed verbal skills than children, counselling with them can draw more on conversation, alongside the general techniques described for children.
Counselling can help adolescents and young adults become more aware of their emotional experiences and better able to solve problems when facing difficult issues, situations, or inner or interpersonal conflicts.
Some of the reasons people come for child and adolescent counselling:
– Parents wanting to understand their child’s or adolescent’s emotional, social and cognitive development and needs.
– Parents wanting an objective assessment of their own knowledge, skills and other capabilities for supporting their child’s growth and upbringing.
– Difficulty adjusting to family circumstances (such as getting on with siblings, a new family member, the absence, death or emigration of loved ones, parents’ conflict and divorce, or serious chronic physical or emotional illness in the family).
– Problems with substance misuse and addiction (in family members or in the child or adolescent).
– Being the target or victim of physical, psychological or sexual abuse.
– Behavioural and emotional disorders (such as depression, anxiety, phobias, eating disorders and so on).
– Suffering from aimlessness, low mood, listlessness, and lack of motivation and interest.
– Difficulty adjusting to school (such as weak or falling grades, conflict with school staff, behavioural problems with classmates and peers, help adjusting to a change of school, choosing a field of study and so on).
– Problems in relationships with others, or wanting to improve them.
– Difficulty understanding and managing sexual needs.
– Difficulty managing anger, aggression and thrill-seeking.
– Preparing to meet the complex world of work effectively.
– Growing better able to meet spiritual needs and questions or crises of meaning.
What makes a child and adolescent counsellor
A child and adolescent counsellor holds at least a master’s degree in counselling with a specialism in children and adolescents or the family, or in clinical psychology, and has been licensed by Iran’s Psychology and Counselling Organization after completing supervised placements under university faculty specialists.
Dr Bahman Bahmani, PhD in counselling, associate professor and faculty member, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences