Sign up for your FREE e-newsletter

You’ll regularly recieve powerful strategies for personal development, tips to improve the growth of your counselling practice, the latest industry news and much more.

We’ll keep your information private and never sell, rent, trade or share it with any other organisation. And you can cancel anytime.

Lifespan Development

Counsellor Tips: Principles of Good Parenting

Have you ever wrestled with a problem, walked away from it for a period, and then ended up having an epiphany while you were officially “off duty” from the problem? Laurence Steinberg, an internationally renowned expert on psychological development during adolescence, talks about having such an experience leading to the development of his book on […]

Children and Emotional Development

A child’s earliest experiences with emotion most often occurs in the family setting. Consequently, the family plays an important role in the development of emotional understanding, particularly interactions between parents and children. For example, children who possess secure attachments with their parents show greater emotional understanding than those children who do not possess secure attachments […]

Personality and Disorders

Everyone has personality traits that characterise them as unique individuals. Such traits refer to the usual way in which a person thinks, feels and behaves. Specifically, personality refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviours, consistently exhibited by an individual over a long period of time. Personality is a complex combination of traits and […]

Challenges of Adolescence

While the definition of adolescent can differ from culture to culture, it is generally accepted that the time referred to as adolescence is the period between childhood and adulthood, a sort of “no man’s land.” Geldard and Geldard (2006) explain that adolescence is a time in a young person’s life where they move from dependency […]

Stages of Child Development

As children travel through the journey of life they are faced with many different developmental challenges. Early in life, babies learn to pay attention and be part of a relationship. As they grow they learn to use their imagination and think logically. Greenspan and Salmon (1995) developed a road map outlining the emotional milestones children […]

Evoking Change in a Client

There are several therapeutic approaches which are useful to improve clients’ readiness to change. It is important, however, to realise that all these strategies are based on the same suggestion: motivation to change is elicited from the client and not imposed from without. Using coercion, persuasion or constructive confrontation will achieve little if the client […]

Fostering the Development of Children’s Self-Esteem

Self esteem is… a person’s overall assessment of her or his personal adequacy or worth. (Weiten, 1998) feelings of self-worth stemming from the individual’s positive or negative beliefs about being valuable and capable. www.dphilpotlaw.com/html/glossary.html feeling good about yourself. It means liking yourself and being content with, and even proud of, who you are.(Hartley-Brewer, 2004) a […]

Communication and Childhood Anxiety

Childhood worries and anxiety are a common challenge for many parents. In this post, we will be considering a cognitive-behavioural approach to working with children and their worries. A cognitive-behavioural approach works most effectively with children who are able to think in a structured sequence and understand cause and effect. This makes it more appropriate […]

Common Communication Challenges for Parents

This post provides an overview of working with parents on common challenges of parenting. In particular, this chapter considers how to work with parents whose children are displaying aggressive behaviour or suffering from anxiety. To work on these issues it is crucial that parents have developed a parent-child relationship based on solid communication and trust. […]

Communicating with Children and Discipline

Disciplining children effectively, not only requires a great deal of persistence but also the ability to communicate clearly and succinctly with children. When working with parents on the issue of disciplining their children, it is important to ensure that all disciplinary strategies are age-appropriate. Bad behaviour comes with penalties Carroll & Reid (2005) suggest that […]

Communicating Effectively with Children

Developing, fostering and maintaining an open, trusting and committed child-parent relationship is the foundation of effective parenting. This kind of relationship is established through regular honest and respectful communication. First, consider the mechanisms that parents may employ to establish an open channel of communication between themselves and their children. By combining appropriate language with useful […]