The Elements of Counseling Children and Adolescents, 2nd Edition
There are other editions available.
This is the most recent edition.
Preface
We, Catherine Cook-Cottone, Laura Anderson, and Linda Kane, present the second edition of a much-needed book bestowing the key elements that comprise the practice of counseling with children and adolescents. We are excited to share our extensive experience both in teaching the counseling process to graduate students as well as in working in schools and private practice with children, adolescents, and their families. We offer a focused and practical guide to supplement coursework in counseling children and adolescents.
The Elements concept is not new. William Strunk first published The Elements of Style text in 1919. It was and has remained, across several editions and years, an introduction to clear, concise writing for college students. In 2005, Scott Meier and Susan Davis published The Elements of Counseling, inspired by the current edition of the famous text (e.g., The Elements of Style; Strunk & White, 2000). The objective of these texts is to distill essential elements of a process (e.g., writing or counseling)—the most potent and practical guidelines—in a user-friendly manual, in essence.
A TEXT BORN FROM NECESSITY
This book is designed to be an introductory or supplemental textbook for graduate courses in counseling with children and adolescents. It would be appropriate across the helping-profession fields: social work, counseling psychology, clinical psychology, school psychology, school counseling, mental health counseling, and rehabilitation counseling. I (Catherine Cook-Cottone) have been teaching a course titled Counseling With Children and Adolescents for over 20 years. In an effort to teach what my husband calls an art form, I have used a variety of course packets of empirical articles, textbooks, and case studies. Never satisfied with attempts at organizing volumes of writings into understandable elements of knowledge, I decided to do what William Strunk Jr. did in 1919 to help his students learn their art—writing. I began to “cut the vast tangle of … rhetoric down to size” into digestible rules and principles, a set of guidelines from which my students could effectively work with children and adolescents. Essentially, I have been working to identify and deliver a key set of elements that could guide them in their practice and refocus them when they struggle.
KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICAL SKILLS PRESENTED IN AN ACCESSIBLE FORMAT
These elements, essential threads of instruction on the process of counseling children and adolescents, are organized in a logical sequence, from setting the stage for the counseling process to the essentials of active counseling practices. Both empirical and theoretical papers published in respected, peer-reviewed journals are provided to support the practices presented. As in other Elements texts, each of the elements is numbered and followed with a brief description and examples as needed. The numbered elements provide a shorthand for meaningful discussions about the counseling process and ease for use with transcript analysis in training programs.
Specifically, the second edition of this book begins with a section on how to set the stage for the counseling process. This includes keys to developmentally appropriate language, activities, and arrangement of office space for work with children and adolescents. The new edition of this book takes a holistic approach to exploring the client’s story, details goals setting as a cocreation, and highlights the importance of being informed about and sensitive to all forms of diversity. Further, this new edition includes content about competency or referral for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/gender queer, intersex, and asexual (
The text emphasizes the conditions and processes of creating growth within the child, explicating the process of assisting growth and self-inquiry. There are new sections on grounding feelings in the body, teaching tools for distress tolerance, and highlighting the importance of progress monitoring. Critically, we added content on teaching skills for negotiating social conflict—a substantial stressor for children and adolescents. Also, this edition of the text provides guidance on cocreating individual and family rules for use of technology.
This text also addresses frequent misconceptions and mistaken assumptions. There is an updated section on crisis intervention and effective referral skills and another on critical topics (e.g., cultural competency, mandated reporting).
As in the original The Elements of Counseling Children and Adolescents, there is a section on knowing oneself as a counselor. In this section, issues such as coming to terms with one’s own childhood and adolescence and the rescue fantasy (i.e., I can save me by saving you) are addressed. There is a succinct introduction to interventions (i.e., including a list of more comprehensive texts on counseling with children and adolescents) and an updated review of techniques often used in work with children and adolescents (e.g., play therapy, solution-focused brief therapy). For ease of reading, throughout the text, the word caregiver will be used to indicate a parent, legal guardian, foster parent, and so on. In addition, since there are three authors, each will indicate when she is referring to her own personal practice or experience by noting her initials (
WELCOME
We welcome you to use this text to develop or further improve your counseling skills. Both the expert and the novice can benefit from a close look at essential skills. You will find that these distilled elements and the guiding questions at the end of each chapter provide a user-friendly format that spurs growth and enhances skills.