You are here
Counselling children and young people
Take a look below at the free resources on working therapeutically with children and young people, covering areas you’ll need to know about, from getting started on working with this client group and being ethical in your practice to specific skills and practical tips you can try out in your own practice
Getting started as a counsellor of children and young people can be challenging. For instance knowing exactly how to get an aggressive, misbehaving or scared child to open up and talk, is a skill that can take time to learn. We’ve put together some advice and information covering some of the topics that students or new counsellors might struggle with at first.
Counselling children presents unique ethical considerations. When working with children and young people, many students can find it a challenge to ensure they are being mindful of the ethical implications they should be aware of when working with this client group. We share here a collection of advice and guidance which we hope will help them to continue to practice ethically and answer some of the questions they might have.
Counselling Skills: Counsellors of children and young people are required to provide counselling for individuals with different characters, different problems, and of different ages. For each child there will be an approach that is best suited to them. Nevertheless, there are a number of child counselling skills which can be used irrespective of the differences between their needs. Here we share a collection of materials with advice and guidance on these necessary skills.
Children and adolescents can experience a range of mental health problems. More than 850,000 children and young people in the UK have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. It is important for all counsellors to be able to recognise the early signs that may accompany the development of these mental health problems and appropriately refer on to other services as required. We share here some guidance and case studies on different mental health conditions which we hope will help your students to approach young clients more effectively and to take the appropriate measures where necessary.
Activities and resources can be used to help engage with children and young people during the counselling process, but how should it be decided which to use and why? We share here a small collection of some practice tips and guidance which we hope will be useful for your students when they are preparing to work with children and young people.