Child Psychology: Definition, Courses, & Degree
Child psychology is the field of psychology focused on the specific mental health needs and experiences of children—it’s a pathway with lots of specialized training.
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I began my graduate studies as a clinical psychologist training to work with kids. The work of a child psychologist defies the stereotype of a quiet therapy room where the therapist and the client sit facing each other in their separate chairs and have a deep and meaningful conversation. As a child psychologist, I spent lots of time drawing and playing games with children as well as talking to their parents. I also spent lots of time gently cajoling children back into their seats or back to the topic at hand. |
I ultimately found that working with children, at least as a psychologist, was not a good fit for me. Truth be told, it is not a good fit for most people; trust me, working with adults on their mental health challenges is hard enough! But we desperately need child psychologists, especially as children and adolescents around the world continue to grapple with the impacts of COVID-19 on their education and their social development. So let’s look at the specific training that child psychologists get.
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What Is Child Psychology? (A Definition)
Each child psychologist, in my experience, tends to prefer working with a certain age group, sort of in the same way that most teachers I know stick with the developmental stage of childhood that suits them best. Although their training is most likely to happen with school-age children and adolescents, child psychologists get experience working with children of all ages. Other students in my training program pursued specialized opportunities to work with toddlers and babies, while I found myself preferring to work with teenagers.
Child psychologists work from a slightly different set of principles and expectations compared to traditional psychologists and those that work primarily with adults (Prinstein & Roberts, 2006). First, they take what is called a developmental psychopathology perspective. This means that when they work with a child, they consider whether the child’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are typical of a child that age or whether they might reflect some degree of atypicality. For example, when I was assessing children, I continually compared their results on different tests to the “norms” for children their age (in other words, the average scores for a group of children like them). A child who scores very highly on a measure of verbal fluency, for example, might be classified as academically gifted. A child like this has good odds of excelling academically, but they may also struggle to connect with other children their age because they are so adept with language.
A second theme for child psychologists is that they work in specialized settings (Prinstein & Roberts, 2006). Child psychologists conduct research and provide care in schools and in pediatric care units within hospitals, so they are typically trained in these spaces and learn the particular nuances of how these spaces work. Where a therapist who works with adults might rarely meet any of their clients’ family or friends, child psychologists regularly interact with their clients’ family members, teachers, and coaches, and sometimes even their friends.
Finally, child psychologists learn to apply psychological tools such as therapies and assessment tools specifically with children. Let me tell you, it is a very different experience to administer a psychological test with a well-regulated adult compared to a hyperactive, bored eight-year-old! Child psychologists have to understand everything about psychology through the lens of development and childhood, and they have to tailor their delivery of interventions to the needs of children.
Why Is Child Psychology Important?
While I can’t put an exact timeline on this, I can tell you that until the last 150 years or so, much of the scientific writing on children—and much of what people would have considered commonsense knowledge—thought of children more or less as miniature adults. In other words, there was little thought given to the possibility that children would need specialized kinds of support. However, a massive amount of research supports the now widely held belief that simply taking concepts and treatments that work with adults and applying them with children and adolescents results in poor and ineffective care (Prinstein & Roberts, 2006).
Simply put, most struggles in adult life have some origin in childhood experiences, and mental health disorders with the same name can look pretty different in a child versus an adult. For example, most adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can sit still for longer periods of time in ways that children with ADHD generally cannot. However, those adults often find the experience very effortful. As another example, the diagnosis of separation anxiety is relatively common among children, for whom being apart from their caregivers can be quite upsetting. Adults with separation anxiety may experience fear of being apart from their family members or their romantic partners, but the ways they express this anxiety and react to it may be quite different.
Child Psychology History
By the mid-1900s, psychologists were giving strong consideration to the possibility that child psychology should be considered its own distinct specialty within psychology (Hupp et al., 2010). Psychologists were concerned about how readily the field took psychological issues known to exist among adults and simply gave the same labels to children. During that time, psychologists also became very interested in how children learned about themselves and the world (Dennis, 1949). They came to recognize that what people must do to live successfully as they mature and age—often called “developmental tasks” by psychologists—looks quite different depending on one’s age.
However, trends in the field of psychology as a whole made it hard for child psychology to distinguish itself at first. After World War II, American psychologists became very focused on mental health problems in adults, and the early versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders did not focus on how mental health disorders might look different in children versus adults (Prinstein & Roberts, 2006). It is only in the last 30 years or so that child psychology as a field has become fully distinguished and recognized.
Examples of Child Psychology Research
Another example of child psychology research comes from one of the earliest and most famous child psychologists, Jean Piaget. A Swiss psychologist, Piaget developed a theory that directly contradicted the idea of children as mini-adults. Instead, through careful observation of his own and other children, Piaget documented how children develop gradually more complex and abstract thinking throughout their childhoods (Ginsburg & Opper, 1998).
Child Psychology Degrees
Psychology faculty have high expectations for potential child psychologists (Karazsia & McMurtry, 2012). People seeking to enter a doctoral program in clinical child psychology will have the best chances if they already have extensive research experience, have completed courses in developmental psychology and psychopathology, and demonstrate research interests that align with those of the faculty with whom they hope to work. This is on top of the typical expectations of excellent performance in undergraduate coursework and a strong set of preexisting interpersonal skills.
Child Psychology Master’s Programs
There are few to no master’s programs that focus specifically on preparing students to work exclusively with children. Instead, most people who want to be primarily child therapists enter a traditional graduate program for therapists that they know will provide ample opportunities to work with children. Attending a school counseling program, which prepares people to be counselors in elementary, middle, and high schools, is another way to get training in child psychology. Finally, there are master’s programs focused specifically on research, and in these programs students may get to conduct research with children.
Child Psychology PhD Programs
At the doctoral level, there are PhD programs focused specifically on preparing people to conduct research and/or do therapy with children and adolescents. I attend one such school, the University of Denver. Among clinical psychologists, the University of Kansas is well known for its clinical child psychology PhD program, which exists alongside a program focused on working with adults. With a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) or Doctor of Education (EdD) degree, one can also provide therapy and assessment for children. Many people also pursue PhDs in developmental psychology—these scholars will not provide treatment to children, but will instead focus on teaching and conducting research with children.
Child Psychology Job Description & Careers
Child psychologists usually engage in research, training, therapy and assessment, or some combination of these responsibilities (Jackson et al., 2010). A child psychologist with clinical training will have worked in multiple different settings and will receive extensive supervision as they learn to conduct assessments and provide therapy. This means that a clinical child psychologist can teach and supervise other people learning to provide therapy and assessment to children. They often do both, providing therapy or assessments while also training others to do the same.
Child psychologists often provide consultation to other professionals as well. This might include meeting with psychiatrists, nurses, and other medical providers as well as social workers, lawyers, teachers, and child protection workers (Jackson et al., 2010).
Since child psychologists’ roles can be so diverse, I think it is important to consider what underlies all of their responsibilities: Child psychologists need to be able to place a child’s behavior in a developmental and social perspective, recognizing that each child’s situation is unique and informed by many different variables (Hupp et al., 2010).
If you’d like to know more about a typical day in the life of a child psychologist, you can watch this video:
Video: Clinical Child Psychologist
Child Psychology Courses
The courses that best prepare people to work as child psychologists focus on the broad categories of understanding development, learning how to assess children, providing therapy to children, and considering social and multicultural issues in working with children (Pidano et al., 2010). This is in addition to solid training in statistical methods, psychopathology, ethics, and general clinical skills (Jackson et al., 2010).
Child Psychology Topics
Child psychologists are often focused on the question of whether a certain behavior or characteristic is developmentally typical (Ollendick & Vasey, 1999). They ask themselves questions like, Is this something I would expect a typical child this age to do or say? If it is not, what potential explanations are there? They are also focused on the relationships children have with the adults in their lives, because these relationships have a powerful impact on the child’s well-being and their future ability to have healthy relationships (Earley & Cushway, 2002). Along these lines, child psychologists are very attentive to possible mistreatment of children, both because they are tasked as clinicians with keeping children safe and because childhood mistreatment predicts many, many outcomes in adulthood (Glaser, 2000).
Articles Related to Child Psychology
Books Related to Child Psychology
Final Thoughts on Child Psychology
Child psychology is an essential specialty in the field of psychology. Catching challenges that people face while they are young can help us head off much greater challenges and negative consequences down the line when people become adults. If the field of child psychology interests you, I encourage you to keep investigating it. The world needs more people with good training helping children to thrive.
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References
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss. (Vol. 1.) Basic Books.
- Dennis, W. (1949). Historical beginnings of child psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 46(3), 224–235.
- Earley, L., & Cushway, D. (2002). The parentified child. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 7(2), 163–178.
- Ginsburg, H. P., & Opper, S. (1988). Piaget’s theory of intellectual development (3rd ed.). Prentice-Hall, Inc.
- Glaser, D. (2000). Child abuse and neglect and the brain—a review. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 41(1), 97–116.
- Hupp, S. D., Jewell, J. D., Reitman, D., & LeBlanc, M. (2010). Competencies in child clinical psychology.In J. C. Thomas, M. Hersen (Eds.), Handbook of clinical psychology competencies (pp. 43–72). Springer Science and Business Media.
- Jackson, Y., Alberts Jr, F. L., & Roberts, M. C. (2010). Clinical child psychology: A practice specialty serving children, adolescents, and their families. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 41(1), 75–81.
- Karazsia, B. T., & McMurtry, C. M. (2012). Graduate admissions in pediatric psychology: The importance of undergraduate training. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 37(2), 127–135.
- Ollendick, T. H., & Vasey, M. W. (1999). Developmental theory and the practice of clinical child psychology. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 28(4), 457–466.
- Pidano, A. E., Kurowski, E. C., & McEvoy, K. M. (2010). The next generation: How are clinical child psychologists being trained? Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 4(2), 121–127.
- Prinstein, M. J., & Roberts, M. C. (2006). The professional adolescence of clinical child and adolescent psychology and pediatric psychology: Grown up and striving for autonomy. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 13(3), 263–268.
- Sroufe, L. A. (1986). Appraisal: Bowlby’s contribution to psychoanalytic theory and developmental psychology; Attachment: Separation: Loss. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 27(6), 841–849.
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