Young children and

It is easy to presume that family therapists are trained to work with the whole family together, including children. Interestingly, a number of investigations have shown that this is not the case, and that many qualified family therapists work mostly, or only, with adults – something which can be perceived as problematic. Two of the explanations for this offered by therapists themselves are that having children in the room makes therapy more difficult and that they have not been trained to work with children. Such observations give rise to a number of interesting questions, but perhaps the big one is: do we have any principles about when and why children should participate in family therapy sessions? It is important to remember that in this discussion I am talking about younger children up to about the age of nine.

To try and approach this question, we can begin by describing some of the properties of parenting and some of family therapy that help frame such a discussion.

Regarding parenting, in most cultures primary developmental support for children is the responsibility of specified caretakers. Power distribution between caretaker and child reflects this premise: for example, while parents and teachers have the right to define a child as being or having problems, few children are accorded this privilege concerning their parents or teachers. While this unequal distribution of power does not have to be a problem, how it is used by the parents may make it a problem for the therapist - and for the child. Further, part of the psycho-social concept of parenthood rests upon a moral idea: that parents are charged with doing as good a job as they can in their role as parents, which includes, for example, functioning as protective and facilitating gatekeepers between the family and child and the rest of the child’s environment. How they do this is left largely up to them, and the control structures in society will only be activated if they are discovered breaking laws or other strongly supported norms.

In family therapy, therapists are taught how families work and how to try and help them when they experience suffering and loss of function. In the case of children, we know that the environment influences their development, for better or worse. Importantly, we know more than this – we also know fairly well what kind of environmental factors support a child’s development, and which hinder it. This means that if we take a child’s perspective and ask what constitutes an optimal biopsychosocial support system, we can specify it in some detail. This knowledge also applies to those children who clearly express divergency throughout their development. In addition, family therapists have specialist knowledge about adult and adult-child relationships, and what is needed to help them flourish, and how to try and help repair them when they become damaged.

So, parents seek help with their child, and family therapists know what children need, know how to repair damaged relationships and know how good relationships work. If we then work with the premiss that it is the parents’ responsibility to support the child’s developmental process, our task is to help parents learn these skills and apply them in their relationship with the child. Then, do children need to be present in the clinical work carried out by family therapists? Not according to some methods, such as for example Marte Meo.

Marte Meo is a method for practicing family therapy focused on children’s needs and development without the children having to participate in the therapy sessions themselves and there are many other methods that offer similar alternatives. In Marte Meo the therapist first films parents and child together in an every-day setting, then