38 - Working with Children and Adolescents

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the various issues affecting the psychotherapy of children and adolescents. Children and adolescents are persons who have not yet grown to adulthood. They are still in the early stages of the life cycle and due to their level of mental development, as a special subpopulation, they need certain specific attention in therapy. Strictly speaking, children are younger than adolescents and they are artificially subdivided by the developmental landmark of puberty. The psychological lives of children and adolescents need to be comprehended from cultural perspectives in addition to those of development, family, and social environment. The relationship between children and their parents, adolescents and adults, is much more tightly interwoven so that they are almost inseparable, which cannot be ignored when clinicians are working with children. Despite this recognition, there is not yet any sufficient and systematic knowledge for clinicians to grasp in terms of how children and adolescents' lives are actually shaped by culture and the kinds of practical cultural considerations that are needed in their care. This is attributed to the shortage of child psychiatrists around the world to accumulate such transcultural knowledge in diverse cultural settings.