Schools are trying to help kids through the mental health crisis that has emerged since the pandemic, but it’s not always easy to get parents on board.
Mayor Adams said recently that the platform Talkspace will provide free online counseling to all New York City teenagers. Parental consent is required.
Michael Elsen-Rooney, a reporter for the education website Chalkbeat, said some parents are put off by the idea of therapy on a screen.
“For the family that I talked to, the teenager was interested in exploring this but the mother still had some concerns,” he said, “and I think for her the idea of online therapy in some ways was even a little bit more scary because she questioned what are the qualifications of these people?”
Experts say therapy is usually more successful when parents are involved, but they are also pushing policymakers to give young people more freedom to consent to therapy without parental approval so teens can get the help they need.
“People like the New York Civil Liberties Union have pushed for much more lax legal rules around who’s able to consent and when, but the social workers and therapists I’ve talked to, certainly they want more kids in therapy but I think they have mixed feelings about what’s the right way to go about this in terms of getting the parents on board or not,” said Rooney.
Parents may not want a child in therapy for reasons that are personal, or even social or political if they feel a school is overstepping its bounds. But in some states a child as young as 12 can consent to therapy on their own.
Rooney said there are some young people in real need, like LGBTQ teens.
“They have higher rates of suicide than their peers and may have really compelling reasons why they need to do it without their parents permission, parents who may not support their sexual orientation or their gender identity,” he said.