Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

Send us Fan Mail Curiosity is fragile, and families can lose it without meaning to. Kim Lee from the Children’s Consultancy unpacks the quiet patterns that shut down a child’s inner world: stress that makes everyone reactive, certainty that turns into labels, and shame that teaches kids they are “too much” or “not enough.” When curiosity disappears, mentalization fades too, and children stop asking “what am I feeling?” and start asking “what’s wrong with me?” We talk through real-life ...

Send us Fan Mail Most people think the big question about autism is whether autistic children “understand other people.” I’m not convinced that question gets us anywhere helpful. What actually changes relationships is noticing how mentalization works under real-world pressure and how often misunderstanding runs both ways, even when everyone involved has empathy and good intent. I walk through how autism has been viewed through theory of mind research, including the legacy of framing autism t...

Send us Fan Mail A social media ban for kids under 16 sounds like the kind of clean, decisive fix adults crave when they feel frightened and powerless. I get that fear. Parents are worried, schools are exhausted, and clinicians and safeguarding teams are seeing what algorithm-driven platforms expose children to: comparison, sexualization, cruelty, misinformation, addictive design, and relentless social evaluation. Still, I’m not convinced prohibition is the answer, especially when it’s presen...

Send us Fan Mail We unpack why children cannot learn emotional regulation alone and how they build it by borrowing calm from a caregiver. We explain containment, co-regulation, and repair, and why these early patterns often show up again in adult relationships. • parents functioning as an external brain in early development • the myth that children should manage emotions on their own • co-regulation as the pathway to self-regulation through repetition • Wilfred Bion’s containment and what it ...

Send us Fan Mail That restless urge to check your phone, reread a text, or ask “Are we okay?” can feel embarrassing, but it is often a learned attachment strategy, not a personality flaw. We close our Psychology of Attachment trilogy by unpacking compulsive care seeking, the pattern where connection matters deeply and uncertainty feels genuinely threatening. When care was available enough to crave but inconsistent enough to doubt, the nervous system can grow up organized around vigilance and ...

Send us Fan Mail The child who never causes problems can be the one carrying the most pain. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m looking at compulsive self-reliance, an attachment-based adaptation where a young person learns that reaching for support leads to disappointment, rejection, or emotional absence. The result can look like maturity and independence, but the engine underneath is often one stark belief: if I need nobody, nobody can hurt me. I walk through how t...