Child Therapy: Issues and Recommendations

When children or adolescents are clients in receipt of psychological treatment, there are specific issues that require attention. With regard to assessment and diagnosis, researchers and clinicians alike must pay attention to variations across sources of assessment data, the comorbidity of diagnoses, and the potential utility of a "family" (as opposed to child) diagnosis. Considerations of "Who is the client?" and the role of the therapeutic relationship in child therapy are discussed. Specific methodological recommendations regarding randomized clinical trials, control groups, the selection of dependent variables, the manualization of treatments, and the use of tests of clinical and statistical significance are presented. Specific topics for research are recommended.