Families and Child Mental Health Treatment

This chapter reviews the evidence base of clinical interventions for youth and families, discusses the benefits, risks, and barriers to caregiver involvement in youth treatment, and highlights important cultural considerations in the treatment and engagement of children and families from underrepresented backgrounds. We discuss three types of interventions, including family focused interventions that work together with the family as a whole, parallel interventions, where youth and their caregivers participate in separate, but related intervention sessions, and caregiver focused interventions, with clinicians only working with caregivers, with less direct work with the youth. The interventions reviewed here are organized by the most common reasons that children and adolescents present for mental health treatment. Treatments were selected based on their level of research support, with a focus on interventions that are at least possibly efficacious. (Chambless et al., 1996; Chambless and Hollon, 1998).