Children’s Counseling Essay (ANSWERED)

QUESTION

Overview

You are required to write 5 essays in current APA format to a provided prompt in each module: week. Each essay will require 500 words in the body of the paper, a title page and a reference page. Each essay will incorporate your reading and study of issues pertaining to issues in Christian Counseling.

Instructions

Each essay will require the following:

500 words revealing a clear understanding of key concepts.
Interaction with the text and scholarly journal articles if required.
Biblical integration.
Each Essay requires 3 in text citations.
Proper grammar.

Use of current APA to include a title and reference page. ** Please note that running head is not required for undergraduate work at Liberty University. An Abstract is also not required for the essay assignments.**

For Essay: Counseling Couples and Children Assignment, you will have a choice of writing on some of the ethical considerations surrounding lay counseling with a couple or lay counseling with a child.

Children’s Counseling

Please use chapter 8 in the text, which includes pages 186-216. This will also need 1 journal article for support. (Use the Liberty University Online Library resources linked in the Essay Resources section).

**Direct quotes are not permitted in the essay assignments. Please paraphrase into your own words when citing**.

Discuss the following in your 500-word essay.

What are some of the ethical concerns/challenges associated with counseling children?
What are some skills needed to effectively counsel children?
If abuse is discovered in the context of counseling how would this need to be handled?
At what point would the lay counselor need to refer?
What would be most rewarding to you when counseling a child?

ANSWER

Children’s Counseling: Ethical Concerns, Skills Required to Counsel Children, How to Handle Abused Children, and Referring a Client

As child mental health problems continue to grow today, leading to a public health crisis, it calls for the need for counseling. Children grow up in dysfunctional, abusive, and broken families, partially contributing to mental health problems. These problems normally extend to adolescence if they are not properly handled and end up late into adulthood. Although it seems like children are the easiest to counsel, ethical challenges posed confirm otherwise. Therefore, special skills, traits, and understanding of the exact conditions of the child to be counseled are needed.

Working with children can lead to confidentiality, privacy, and legal privilege issues, which can pose challenges in the counseling process. Sometimes, parents may contribute to these challenges due to the competing interests between them and their children (Sori and Hecker, 2015). Sometimes parents may want to get information out of the counselors even when there is a confidentiality clause in counseling. Scenarios as such threaten the ethics of counseling children.

At the same time, developmental issues and legal vulnerabilities may hinder the counselor from achieving the expected results. For instance, a child may have cognitive problems that make engaging difficult. Even if the engagement is easy, ethical crossroads can arise from the fact that the children are involved with many organizations, as Bassett (2014) notes. They go to school; they engage with social service agencies, churches, and other systems involved in their development.

Children may be delicate to handle, especially in matters that may harm their mental well-being. Therefore, a special skillset is required to work with them. Counselors need to be patient with the children as they may be assessing their surroundings before they can share any information. Still, the counselors need to be understanding as children are not like adults and may be careful or scared with what they share. Lastly, the counselor needs to note all forms of non-verbal communication, listen actively, and, most importantly, build rapport with the children.

Some situations when counseling children may need a counselor to take action. For instance, if a counselor discovers abuse during counseling, it may be a challenge when the confidentiality clause has to be broken. Legally, counselors are obligated to parents. In God’s eyes, the parents have the right to pursue treatment for their children, which can even mean seeking the services of another counselor (Bassett, 2014). However, they have feelings of being more ethically responsible than the parents, and this causes a lot of tension. Nonetheless, if the counselor discovers abuse, it is within their capacity to get the parent involved, which will later escalate to the law if the parent does not cooperate because the legal obligations cease to exist upon noncooperation.

In such a situation where a lay counselor is not capable of providing the intended treatment to their client, they are allowed to refer. Considering they do not have the capacity to address certain issues because of their lack of background in psychology, they are allowed to refer their clients to a professional who can help out effectively (Dorsey et al., 2019). Still, they can refer clients proving difficult to handle or who are subscribed to professional counseling.

In conclusion, counseling a child, apart from the tangible benefits attached, can be rewarding as you get to be part of a child’s life. However, the most rewarding thing in counseling is knowing you have helped a child recover, put their worries in the past, and embrace what you taught them.

References

Dorsey, S., Meza, R. D., Martin, P., Gray, C. L., Triplett, N. S., Soi, C., … & Whetten, K. (2019). Lay Counselor Perspectives of Providing a Child-Focused Mental Health Intervention for Children: Task-Shifting in the Education and Health Sectors in Kenya. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10, 860.

Bassett, R. L. (2014). Christian Counseling Ethics: A Handbook For Psychologists, Therapists, and Pastors. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 33(3), 289-291.

Sori, C. F., & Hecker, L. L. (2015). Ethical and Legal Considerations when Counselling Children and Families. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 36(4), 450-464.