In our ten years of existence as an agency, we’ve spoken to countless parents who were worried about their child’s behaviour. So many of you have faced moments when you’ve considered whether the support of a child therapist might be the solution. Some of you have faced crises that have made this support a necessity.
We live in a world where children face extraordinary pressures: academic pressures, social pressures exacerbated by social media, social pressures compounded by neurodivergencies.
With this in mind, Clarendon have been looking for a long time for someone we are happy to recommend to our families. We have found that therapist.
Ian Paton trained at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist (ACP) with over twenty years experience working with children and young people with a range of difficulties.
Ian has worked within mainstream and specialist CAMHS services, in third sector charities, within independent and mainstream schools, and now works in full time private practice in central London. He has published papers on a range of topics and teaches and supervises in the UK and internationally.
We are very proud to recommend Ian Paton to all our Clarendon families and we sat down with him last week to ask him a few questions:
Clarendon: What is your approach when taking on a child as a patient?
Ian: When assessing a child patient I always meet with the parents or carers first in order to understand what the concerns are and to hear about the child’s history. After this I usually meet with the child three times over three consecutive weeks in order to understand where they might be struggling in their development. I then meet with the parents again to feed back my thoughts and make recommendations for further treatment, supplying a report if required. By the end of this package of assessment parents usually have a good understanding of the options available to them.
Clarendon: How much are parents involved in the process, and are they kept informed of progress?
Ian: In ongoing psychotherapy it is important that parents are involved in the process so they can continue to support their child. If a child is being seen in individual psychotherapy then parents are usually seen alongside by a colleague, every two to four weeks, in order to have support in thinking about their child. Then once per term the child’s therapist, the parent clinician and the parents themselves all meet to review how treatment is progressing.
Sometimes I work with parents alone without the need to meet with their child at all. This works well with children or adolescents who are resistant to seeing a therapist. We might think about how to help things not escalate into arguments at home, how to notice the triggers in themselves which stop them parenting to the best of their ability, or how to work more successfully as a parental couple.
In work with older adolescents it is usually not necessary to meet with parents, as the work is often based around helping the adolescent grow up, separate from their parents and prepare for the adult world. Privacy in this work becomes more important.
Clarendon: Do you have any advice for parents who are unsure about whether to seek the help of a child psychotherapist and who worry that the intervention might seem heavy-handed?
Ian: Sending one’s child to a therapist might seem daunting at first but it only means the child is receiving temporary support, so they can get back on track with their development. If a child gets too easily distracted by their peers, struggles to sustain friendships, or can be argumentative with others, then imagine the knock-on impact on their capacity to listen to teachers and learn in the classroom. It is quite striking how many children, once their worries are addressed in psychotherapy, make great strides in their capacities to achieve their potential academically. I believe it is worth while addressing issues early rather than letting them become more entrenched and harder to address later on.
Clarendon: What are the possible benefits of psychotherapy on a child’s wellbeing?
Ian: When children are struggling they tend to not communicate with words but instead with actions, which can make it hard to support them as relationships can become easily frayed. Child and adolescent psychotherapists are trained to carefully observe play, behaviour and to listen carefully in order to understand the underlying factors causing difficulties. If a child is unhappy, anxious or angry, they tend to have lower self-esteem and less confidence. By identifying the anxieties and addressing them in psychotherapy the child is helped to develop a stronger sense of their own abilities, and can explore the outside world with more confidence.
Clarendon: Children, and particularly teenagers, often shut down when talking to their parents, do you have any advice on how to foster open communication?
Ian: Children and adolescents often don’t know why they are feeling anxious, unhappy or angry, so when parents ask them what is wrong they often genuinely don’t know. What they do instead of talking is communicate their difficult feelings to those around them very powerfully with ‘naughty’ behaviour. Sometimes parents (understandably!) can respond to the behaviour without understanding the underlying causes, which further frustrates the child causing a negative loop. In these situations I usually try to help the parents reflect on what they think might be causing the difficulties underneath the behaviour, which usually helps the parents feel less powerless and more hopeful.
With teenagers who keep their parents at arms length it is worth keeping in mind that the main task of adolescence is to gradually learn to separate from one’s parents and form a mature identity of one’s own. Parents will need to adapt to their developing teenager and learn new ways of communicating with them. This might involve revisiting rules around such as phone and video game usage, curfews, and other contentious subjects. It is difficult, but it helps to try to role-model flexibility and thoughtfulness when speaking to teenagers who can easily get agitated. If a teenager witnesses their parent remaining calm whilst discussing these subjects it can help them learn how to do it themselves one day.
Clarendon: Thank you Ian!
If you’d like to learn more or be put in touch with Ian, don’t hesitate to contact any one of the Clarendon team.
