What Changes During Adolescence?

Find a therapist to support kids and teens

If children are old enough to be curious, they are old enough to be given honest answers.

Children are never too young to be treated respectfully and protected from ignorance

Not-knowing is unbearable, and so unknowns are filled with worry or fantasy

Since the UK Prime Minister announced the Government’s plans to ban social media for under-16s, there’s been renewed talk about “age appropriateness”. This is a topic that has wider implications than online activity, and one that comes up regularly in my supervisory practice, often on themes to do with sex and death, as illustrated by these fictional examples:

A play therapist told me that six-year-old Jessica said her hamster looked weird and didn’t want to play, like he used to. She thought she had done something to upset him, because she doesn’t want to play with her friends when they upset her. The therapist knew from Jessica’s father that her beloved pet had died, but because he thought she was “too young to understand”, he’d substituted the hamster with a replacement and said nothing, leaving her confused and inadvertently upsetting her anyway.

I heard that nine-year-old Elsie believed she was cursed........

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