Why Therapists Stop Working with Kids and What It Takes to Stay: Sustainability, Boundaries, and Pivots for the Long Haul

About this episode

The episode discusses the challenges therapists face when working with children and teens, including sustainability and the need for boundaries.

Why Therapists Stop Working with Kids and What It Takes to Stay: Sustainability, Boundaries, and Pivots for the Long Haul Curt Widhalm, LMFT, and Katie Vernoy, LMFT push back on the field's quiet stereotype that working with kids is the "starter home" of private practice, the place clinicians put in time before graduating to a cardigan and a wing-back chair. Working with kids and teens is not entry-level work. It is some of the most clinically and physically demanding work in the profession, and it has a sustainability problem that rarely gets named honestly. Curt and Katie examine why so many therapists who work with kids and teens hit a wall around the five-year mark, and why that wall is rarely about clinical depth. They unpack the sensory toll, the parent communication load, the school and provider coordination, the cost of running a play therapy room, and the way a child caseload can quietly distort a clinician's sense of what is developmentally typical. They also talk about how to build a long-haul career working with kids, teens, and families without becoming, in Curt's words, "a cynical, glitter-covered shell of a human being." This is a conversation for therapists in…

People in this episode

Hosts: Curt Widhalm, LMFT, Katie Vernoy, LMFT

Topics covered

• therapists working with kids
• sustainability in therapy
• boundaries in practice
• burnout in therapists
• clinical demands of child therapy

Keywords

• child therapy
• teen therapy
• therapist burnout
• clinical demands
• sustainability
• boundaries
• private practice

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