Counselling Children, Adolescents and Families: A Strengths-Based Approach

Every generation has its challenges. When I was growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, my parents worried about drugs and changing sexual mores. ‘We just didn't do the kinds of things you kids do nowadays,’ I can remember my mother saying to me on repeated occasions during my childhood and adolescence. My father would invariably add something on the order of, ‘Yes, Scott, listen to your mother. It's a lot harder growing up in today's world,’ and then, after a brief pause, he would continue. ‘There are more temptations and the consequences more severe, less room for a miss-step. Don't make any choices that might ruin your future.’ Commentators of the time described my generation as rebellious like no other in history – a label many of us at the time wore as a badge of honor. We were striking out against the established order. We were for peace instead of war, love instead of hate, freedom in place of rules and restrictions.

Now a parent myself, I have a much better appreciation of my parents' concerns. As Mark Twain once wryly observed, ‘When I was a boy of fourteen, my parents were so ignorant I could hardly stand to have them around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much they'd learned in seven years.’ And while I hate to admit it, I find myself believing at some deep level that these are the most troubling times yet in which to raise a child. In addition to the drugs and changing social mores, we now have AIDS, violence, sexual abuse, high divorce rates, as well as a frightening number of psychiatric disorders that were either rare or non-existent during my generation.

Attention-deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, learning problems, Asperger's syndrome, conduct disorder, autism, anger and emotional dyscontrol, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and childhood onset schizophrenia are but a few of the maladies in recent years to provoke public anxiety about the status of children's mental health. One can rightly wonder, what is happening to our kids? Has the world grown so toxic? Is modern life merely too complex? And, perhaps most important, what should I do as a parent, educator, counselor, or social worker?

The answer to these questions have far reaching implications for how we handle the problems that invariably show up in the rearing of children. For example, a recent study found a three-fold increase in the use of psychotropic drugs in children between 1997 and the present. Never mind that most such drugs have never been approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for use with kids under any circumstances. In fact, seven out of ten drugs given to children have never been tested and proven safe or effective for use by them. All of this, however, begs the question: is such widespread use of medication with kids the right thing to do? Sadly, the answer, at this point in time, is unknown. We [Page x]simply don't know the long-term consequences of this increasingly popular form of intervention.

When the health and well being of children is at stake, whatever we do, however much we spend, may never seem adequate. The serious nature of the problems unites with our strong desire for change, compelling us to take dramatic and immediate action. Unfortunately, history shows that perspective is a frequent casualty of this process. For example, many treatment approaches have, with time, later proven ineffective or actually dangerous – and not just in the past. Recently, when the public was concerned about a rise in the juvenile crime rate, many adolescents were sent to inpatient settings to be treated in groups. Only later did research find that this approach actually made the problem worse! At the same time, diagnostic labels seem to come in and out of professional and public focus with some regularity. Not long ago, for example, there seemed to be a dramatic increase in the numbers of kids with eating disorders. Anorexia and bulimia were the focus of a wide number of books, workshops, and talk shows. And then suddenly, and without fanfare, the problem simply receded into the background.

Returning to the question posed earlier, ‘So what is a parent, educator, counselor, or social worker supposed to do?’, I remember a quote from a textbook I read during my second year as an undergraduate student in psychology. We were studying adolescent development at the time. Specifically, we were learning about the challenges parents face raising kids during this difficult phase of life. The authors of the text cited various parents, including the following:

The comments were hardly surprising in their own right. After all, the sentiments sounded similar to those expressed by adults about my generation and me. Imagine my surprise, however, when I learned that the quote was nearly 2500 years old! Although edited somewhat to fit modern times, Plato was the parent complaining about the problem of ‘today's youth’.

From that experience, I learned a lesson about the importance of maintaining perspective that has stayed with me to this day. These are not the worst of times; neither are they the best. True, we don't want to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. It is equally important, however, that our lenses not be tinted in a way that always has us seeing smoke and fire. In other words, when trying to determine how best to be helpful, maintaining a balanced view is critical. It is a simple idea that is not always easy to put into practice.

In his book Counselling Children, Adolescents and Families: A Strengths-based Approach, Dr John Sharry accomplishes exactly that. First, he addresses the many serious issues facing children and adolescents without ever losing sight of the fact that the kids themselves are the greatest problem-solving resource available to helpers. Second, in a clear, engaging, and step-by-step fashion, he describes how therapists, social workers, and helpers of all stripes, can tap into [Page xi]the many assets and abilities lying in wait in today's youth. Troubled children and adolescents will most certainly benefit from the perspective offered to their therapists within these pages. I highly recommend it.

Writing a book on how to help people therapeutically as a professional is somewhat a doomed project. At the heart of the helping process are human relationships and the experience is far too subjective and personal to be satisfactorily summed up in a theory. No therapeutic model is a complete explanation and no set of techniques will lead to perfect therapy. Therapy is more of an art than a science, and though models can sometimes illuminate the way, they can also sometimes obscure, especially when people believe the model to be truer than the unique reality of the clients in front of them and forget that the ‘map is not the territory’. Solution-focused therapy, the model that underpins this book, is equally prone to these dangers. Exponents can over-rely on the techniques and miss the strengths-based thinking that underpins the model. Or they can neglect aspects of the helping relationship such as empathic listening, hearing the client's story and establishing an alliance that are not explicitly emphasised in the original model.

I'm reminded of a story told by Irvin Yalom about a young cook who wished to learn the skill of a master chef renowned for his legendary cooking. The young man obtained copies of the great chef's recipes and though he followed them to the letter, he could never arrive at the master's standards and his meals always fell a little short of excellence. Undeterred, he went to the master chef's restaurant and sneaked into the kitchen to observe him cooking. As he watched, he noticed that during the cooking the chef would break the rules of the recipe and would add unmeasured handfuls of extra spices and herbs, apparently at random to the meal. Surprised, he challenged the chef as to why he was not following the recipe and adding all these extra ingredients that didn't appear in the recipe. The chef answered simply that it was these extra ingredients that made the meal taste so good!

So in writing this ‘recipe book’ for therapy with children and families, I realise that it is quite limited. I realise that there are many more ‘extra ingredients’ to effective therapy that are not contained in this book and that these may vary across different professionals and different contexts. Furthermore you may not know what these ‘extra ingredients’ are until you meet the individual child that [Page xiii]you are trying to help. Each child and adult are their own unique individual and each meeting is a unique inter-subjective encounter. For this reason it is important not to start from a position of complete certainty, but rather from ‘one of unknowing’. When you don't know everything you make room for the client's knowledge and ideas, and these are certainly the most helpful. It is the willingness to let go of assumptions and the ability to look for freshness and newness in each human encounter that makes the therapeutic relationship work.