Excelling at Telehealth with Children and Teens

 
 

Working with children and teens online has been a passion of mine since 2015. I’ve had to learn how to navigate legal and ethical considerations, standards of care via digital means, and how HIPAA is applied to online therapy. I attended numerous training sessions on these topics. What I couldn’t find, at the time, was information on working with children and teens specifically. In fact, most of the information I was given was framed for adults. So, I combined my knowledge of trauma-informed treatment with youth, my art therapy skills, and my love for pop-culture to find and create interventions for my under 18 clients.

Now that most clinicians have moved their practice online to prevent the spread of COVID-19, many have struggled to figure out how to provide the treatment with kiddos. How do you maintain safety? How do you keep an already minimally engaged teenager interested when you’re on a screen? How do you help families who have limited resources and may need to do sessions over the phone? How do you keep privacy?

These are all important and valid questions. They were the same ones that I found myself asking when I began. In hopes of providing guidance to my fellow clinicians, I joined licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Elizabeth “Beth” Irias, of Clearly Clinical, to help therapists excel in working with children and teens online, by answering these questions, and more. I also provide examples of a few of my go-to interventions. Clearly Clinical is an online behavioral health Continuing Education program. Presented in a podcast, you can listen to this interview for free, but if you’d like the CE’s for this course, please go to the website and sign up for a membership!

I hope that hearing this podcast will give you the guidance, inspiration, and support you’re looking for.


Looking for more guidance, support, and interventions? Purchase my 100-page resource guide which goes into detail about safety, how to prevent online fatigue, maintain engagement, and safety considerations for online game play!


Did you listen to the podcast? What are your go-to interventions with children and youth online?



Ariel Landrum, LMFT, ATR

Ariel is the Director of Guidance Teletherapy. She runs the day-to-day operations, and is one of our treating clinicians. She writes about mindfulness, coping skills, and navigating the private practice world.

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