ABSTRACT
This chapter takes on the growing trend towards pathologizing children and de-contextualizing the challenges they face. This trend involves a privileging of expert knowledge that collapses diagnoses with children’s identities and overshadows collaborative, competency-based possibilities within the therapeutic process. Drawing on stories from therapeutic practice, the chapter outlines an approach to walk-in therapy clinics that eschews an assessment of deficit in favor of therapeutic exchanges that foreground the knowledges of children and their families. The conversational practices outlined include: collaborating on the session agenda, getting to know the person “away from” the problem, externalizing, and collaborative documentation. Based on a social and relational view of problems, this approach makes it possible to address labels and diagnoses in ways that are respectful of people’s current understandings and preferences, while providing alternatives to the limiting descriptions of the child that have developed. The chapter includes reflections and feedback from children and their parents about their experiences of these practices in a walk-in therapy clinic.
