This is something many recent graduates experience as they start working with clients without the “protective” title of intern. Even more seasoned clinicians get a wary look from parents who interpret a cautiousness or tentativeness or youthful appearance as inexperience or a lack of authority to get the job done. In either case, the result is that the therapist feels as though he or she needs to prove themselves to be up for the task. Therapists typically respond to this pressure by citing their credentials — degrees, clinical placements, years in practice, etc. in an effort to verify ..read more

By holding our kids to a higher standard of treating one another, we can put an end to so much of the bullying and unkindness that gets passed off as “typical sibling rivalry” Over the years a lot of bad teen behavior has, unfortunately, become normalized as simply “typical teen behavior.” A second cousin to this is normalizing chronic sibling rivalry as “typical sibling rivalry.” Parents often tell me that shoving a brother out of the way or making a snarky remark about the goal he didn’t block at his big soccer game is “normal” sibling rivalry. It’s not. It only looks that way because it hap ..read more

Today’s teenagers are looking for therapists who can help them out of the innumerable rabbit holes cluttering the landscape of adolescence and young adulthood. It can’t be a lecture about social media or the dangers of smoking weed. It can’t be a verbal version of a power point slide show listing all the risks of losing oneself in a virtual world. People don’t miss what they never had or never felt. We can’t expect teenagers to appreciate what it would be like — what they would be like — if they were more interested in their capacities for imagination and inventiveness and the reverence that b ..read more

Never has the adage “I was a teenager once too, you know” been more tone deaf to the experience of being a teenager than it is today. So much has changed in the past decade-plus, in ways that have altered the DNA of how kids communicate with one another, entertain and distract themselves, stay connected or don’t, relate with family members, acquire information about the world, and plan for their futures, among many other things. A lot of the changes are welcome, and long past due. The embracing of mental health care among youth, and the national dialogue about it that they have brought forward ..read more

 Recent advances in brain research have confirmed for us that there are qualitative differences between the brain of an adolescent and that of an adult, impacting the way adolescents remember, think, reason, focus attention, make decisions, and relate. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA School Medicine, and author of many books related to the neuroscience of behavior and  relationships, writes that these changes show up in the following ways — the adolescent’s search for: novelty, the company of peers, emotional intensity, and creative exploration. Can these qualiti ..read more

You’d think that’s where a therapist would start, and maybe many do. I find it a task better suited to doing therapy with adults though, who typically are self-referred and have thought enough about therapy to actually have treatment goals. Moreover, most adults in therapy don’t feel as strong a need to save face as might a defensive teen, who is there only because someone said she should be, and for whom engaging in a conversation about treatment goals is akin to conceding that she does in fact belong in therapy: If I agree to work on a problem, they’ll think that I believe I have it. We can ..read more

  People often say they find it easier to empathize with individuals with whom they share a history or religion or culture or occupation than with individuals with whom they feel they have little in common. At first blush it makes sense; you figure you can more easily appreciate what someone else is going through once you’ve “been there” or at least know a bunch of other people who have been there. At the very least, you are familiar with some of the circumstances. But by complacently accepting this idea that, in order to understand other people, you have to walk a mile in their shoes ..read more

If you’re struggling to get genuine conversations going with your teenager, consider these three questions.   “I try to ask open-ended questions like they told me to but even still, my daughter just kind of shrugs and gives me only a word or two before going upstairs to her room…” Are you asking about something she’s genuinely interested in talking about?  It’s probably not any of these topics: Her day at school. How she thinks she did on her math test. How practice went. How much does she have left to do on her science project. Whether she completed her chores. Ask her instead w ..read more

When we first learned about therapy and the importance of a good therapeutic alliance, our attention was directed toward a small but unwavering group of principles that were understood to be critical in fostering this kind of connection. We were taught to demonstrate to our clients empathy, confidentiality, and unconditional support so that clients could tell we were compassionate and safe to talk with and, presumably, feel good about trying therapy. Basically, we chased them.  As therapists, we generally think of rapport as something built over time, and that it is the time together that ..read more

Is this what it feels like to you when you ask your ADHD son to complete his chores? “I don’t really get after him when he doesn’t listen to me because he’s got ADHD…” the parent of an inattentive 11 yr old explains, forgetting to make the distinction between inattentiveness and frank disregard. Parents and educators often mistake a kid’s inattentiveness for an attention deficit disorder when that kid is simply ignoring the adults’ directives. By not holding children or teenagers accountable for their intentional lack of attention, or regard, or response, we are enabling them to hide behi ..read more