What if we had children or teens acting as therapists?

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I don't understand. I'm one of the unlucky weirdos who doesn't get any kind of buzz from alcohol

Even so. Mature adults don't self medicate with alcohol. It's just a placebo. It's just wallpaper over the cracks.

Now I can understand why at 12 year old let down by people who were meant to help him would find solace in it. I'm not judging. I'm not the kind of demonizes drink.

But, a real good proper therapist would teach coping techniques and would actually listen.

I had a good therapist in my mid 20s who focussed on techniques to deal with how I was affected by things as they came up. She had a controlling moody mother too, so she understood where I was coming from with my insecurities and helped me see how I was feeling wasn't my fault and I didn't need to fear everyone I came into contact with.

For me, the best therapists have always been the four-footed kind-my pets. My cats (and dogs, too) were there by my side, always.

I guess it's just called friendship.

My idea was more about same-age child therapists. But within two years isn't too shabby, either. A sixth-grader is far more likely to sympathize and help a fifth grader whose parents yell at him all the time, as opposed to an adult who doesn't have to answer to anybody and hasn't been yelled at in decades.

Exactly! With two adults interacting, you were both her customer and her client. That's not the case for a kid or a teen seeing an adult therapist, where the parents are the customer. Plus, in your 20's, you were already shrewd enough to outsmart that therapist if she started gaslighting you.

That's why I always begged my parents for a dog or a cat. I wanted someone in my home who doesn't boss me around, even it's an animal. Needless to say, my parents said no; a pet fits under the "too much pleasure" category, I guess. At one point, they had a moment of mercy and got me a hamster, but hamsters can't form a friendship with a kid the way dogs and cats can.

Hamsters don't live very long and are much more work to take care of than cats. I had a hamster once, and she would have died if my dog hadn't found her. That dog was very smart and helpful and a great companion.

Parents don't get dogs for their kids because it's too much work, not because it's too fun.

Also it's expensive. Especially when they get sick.

Do you have a pet now? If not, why not?

Well, if a dog or cat can make a big difference in a child's life, from being a fun playmate at home to keeping him from committing suicide, then isn't it worth the extra work and expense? Or is keeping a child from having too much pleasure more important?

I don't have pets now, not even fish. I have friends. I have fun things to do every weekend. I have vodka in my freezer at all times. I have the freedom to do whatever I want, and answer to no one. So I guess there isn't a need for a pet, like there was when I was a kid. I volunteer in animal shelters periodically, though.

I wonder if I would have enjoyed volunteering in an animal shelter as a child. (That is, if I didn't try to take all the puppies and kittens home. ) But that idea never occured to me, nor my family, nor my therapist.

Of course, any health benefits of interacting with animals would be negated by my family yelling at me after getting home, over some perceived slight. So it's really a moot point.

Again, I tried telling my therapist how unhappy my home life was. But she just smiled, nodded, and said "aww". Not even a hint of helpfulness! In retrospect, I don't blame her; "the adult world" is all she knew for 20 years by then. So a child would have been more helpful than her.

I don't understand. If you have so much trouble with your family, why not get a job and work towards independence? Even if you struggle with employment like so many of us do, there are options available for those who have a desire to work and the ability to be independent on the level that your posts suggest. Your family is obviously a source of considerable stress, so for your own mental well-being, perhaps cutting them off and moving on would be best.

Hey, Aspie1, interesting idea. Basically like peer support/peer specialist in mental health, but you're widening it to include younger people.

That's one of their strong points, no?

Yes, this was inspired by the floor manager's speech when I volunteered in a food bank. It was on a day they admitted kids. (Usually, you must be 16+ to volunteer.) She talked extensively about "kids helping kids" during a pre-volunteering speech, presumably to get the kids interested. After all, I'm sure kids will be far more excited about helping people their age, rather than abstract "needy families". (With all adults, the floor manager focuses on the importance of volunteering, work safety, and OSHA rules.)

"Strong point" is part of it. But the real reason is that even though "adults have been kids before" , NT adults have total amnesia to unpleasant childhood is. So an adult is ill-equipped to provide talk therapy to a child, simply because adults and kids live in vastly different planes of existence, and kids know it. Plus, older kids will have a hard time being honest with yet another authority figure posing as their friend; it comes off as insincere. So a better way is to have someone on the same plane of existence providing therapy to kids and teens.

We can have exceptions to the above for cases of molestation, severe physical abuse, etc. But for garden-variety "I cry myself to sleep at night because I have no one to play with" or "my parents yell at me at random moments", a therapist of the same age works much better. Plus, even if all a therapist does is coo at the patient, ask rhetorical questions (like "How did that make you feel?"), and/or go "aww"---as is very common during therapy---it's far less insulting coming from another child, than from an adult with a Master's degree in psychology.

Perhaps my concept can include group therapy for kids/teens, with two mostly-silent adult facilitators (a man and a woman, to avoid a gender bias) present in the room. I know it'll be easier for the NT society to embrace. But for aspie or even NT kids who lost trust for adults in general, one-on-one sessions with a therapist their age may be the only way to get them the help they need. Not "feelings talk" or platitudes, but help.

It's actually not that far out in left field of an idea. However, you would have to consider the age of the child as well as social circumstances. There are also a lot of laws in the way of this, but we do have research studies that delve into these things.

I will say earlier today I had a situation that I didn't know how to handle. I volunteer as a 2nd grade community program leader and I encountered something today that I didn't understand. I discussed it with my eldest son because I felt like he may have a fresh, more age appropriate perspective to offer. He did.

He nailed it on the head and even proceeded to tell me why. He was right, it was something I wouldn't have come up with on my own. His youth gave him an advantage, as well as helped me.

Ok, I am convinced. Your therapist was useless.

But I still think it's because she's a useless human being anyway, not because she was an adult.

There are good adult therapists for childen out there who genuinely do care and do try to help.

Even if there was such a thing as a peer to peer therapy for kids your parents wouldnt have taken you. They obviously werent interested in actually helping you otherwise they would have got a better therapist.

I get that laws will make such form of therapy impossible. So we'd have to repeal child labor laws first. Which will have a side effect of letting kids have actual jobs, rather than doing hours of useless homework every night; I once started a thread on that topic too, but I won't delve into it here. And as we all know, elections don't do jack. And America today is too conservative (not meaning in a political sense) to try something new that could actually work. They'd rather sit in a chair and blather about feelings. So all in all, my idea was mostly a fantasy, that we could implement in an all-aspie society, or something like that.


Eh... I wouldn't go that far. My mom lover her. She talked at length about how warm, friendly, and helpful she is. The first time my family met her, she and my mom got along right away. They talked about coping with moving across the country (which the therapist did too, from the same state, even). As well as about raising a family; while I sat in the same room like a ghost, mind you. My dad was more reserved in praising her, but he said "she seems very nice". They didn't get along as quickly, but she told him some things about coping with a more urban work culture; I don't know if it was something he already knew or not. (We previously lived in a small city.) It was irrelevant to me at the time, obviously.

My older sister never interacted with her; she was an adult (20) at the time of the move, so she already had access to pleasures that helped her cope: freedom to come and go as she pleased, choosing what to eat, her own money, and just a year later, alcohol too. Therefore, she never even met the therapist.

All in all, it checks out: being a "family" therapist, she was meant to help parents. Plus, she and my mom had the "natural women's camaraderie" thing going on. My dad, let alone myself, had no such advantage. It wasn't until later that my parents wanted me to see her too, since I had trouble coping with the recent cross-country move. I said OK. Little did I know that being a kid, and a boy to boot, would work against me in therapy. When I told her about things that troubled me, I discovered how unhelpful she was. It doesn't take a Master's degree to sit a big chair and coo at a troubled kid. A child can do it. Speak of the devil... .

One solution is for the adult monitor (who simply oversees the two-kid therapy session) to pose as the actual therapist to the parents, then secretly introduce the child therapist later on. I actually think my parents might be sold on the idea. I had trouble making friends, so they'd probably think that working with a therapist my age could help me in that department. But I doubt today's mental health community, not to mention insurance companies, will allow it.

Maybe the said therapist was compatibile with an emotional woman but not at all with an Aspie boy.

Your ideas are quite close to some kind of a group therapy / very small support group for teenagers.

Some high schools have peer counselors

Students counsel students

That is a volunteer job

Not a paying job

I tend to think children have too much power nowadays, not too little. There are certain realisations, certain aspects of intelligence that don't emerge until well into adulthood. I can't fathom the fact that people want to lower the voting age to sixteen; personally I believe that it should be increased to twenty one and, indeed, to thirty. I say this as a twenty two year old myself. The only reason so many powerful people are lobbying for what might be called "children's lib" is that they have a vested interest in breaking up the family, knowing that family loyalties are a threat to their economic and political hegemony.