Question

(In clinical child psychology) Making diagnosis in children has some difficulties. What do you have to consider and what are these difficulties?

Please include a paragraph between 350 and 400 words. Explain and please it should be a paragraph, no short answer or no definition.

Answer 1

It is true that there are various challenges in diagnosing mental health issues in young children. Some of these issues are:

Younger children find it difficult to express clearly what they are going through compared to the older ones, who can reveal their internal states. Sometimes mental health practitioners jump into conclusions and make a diagnosis based on few observations. Often what might be abnormality in older children, might not be for the young ones. We need to have a clear understanding of where the child stands developmentally and not simply lump behaviors and calim them to be disorganized or abnormal. Thus, another major challenge is that there is no clear cut developmental chart universal to all children and children change rapidly during the growing years.

Few things that we must consider while dealing with young children is that, we must heavily rely on our observational skills and reports from parents, teachers, caretakers etc to know what exactly is troubling the kid, because they are often not expressive enough. we must consider the fact that children change quite fast in the growing years. So attributing these developmental changes to treatment interventions would be a false move.  

Therefore, we must make careful assessments, use multiple reporters, frequent meetings and sessions so that we can meet the child on a daily basis and know the changes, use multiple modalities and these will ensure that minimize the mistakes while diagnosing young children.