What is a Child Psychologist?

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A Child Psychologist is a Psychologist who, through training and subsequent work, has specialised in working with children and adolescents. This would include developing skills in assessing children and using tools which are appropriate and research-validated for use with children. Therapeutic work with young children can involve working with the child’s parents, carers or teachers, or can involve working directly with the child. Working directly with young children often involves drawing on play-based activities to support the child in expressing their emotions, particularly when they have not yet developed the language skills to do so.

When working with adolescents, many of the therapeutic approaches used with adults such as cognitive behaviour therapy are also used effectively with young people. Therapeutic work with an adolescent would involve an initial assessment session to gain a better understanding of the young person’s difficulties and to discuss how individual therapy could help. The psychologist will often meet with the adolescent’s parents at the beginning of therapy to gain background information and to discuss the therapeutic plan to be put in place. If individual therapy sessions are appropriate, the psychologist will work with the person for an agreed number of sessions.

We are currently recruiting a Child & Adolescent Clinical Psychologist but unfortunately have nobody in post currently. Please check back to our website in the next month for any further updates.