When Therapy Is Asked to Fix Children

Locating distress

In many Western approaches to mental health, distress is understood as something that lives inside the individual child — in behaviour, emotion, diagnosis, or nervous system responses. Support is often shaped around helping the child adapt, cope, or regulate so they can move more smoothly through the world around them.

But children do not grow in isolation.

They grow in families, classrooms, communities, cultures, and landscapes. They respond to pace, pressure, safety, loss, belonging, and care. When distress is located only within the child, the wider ecology of their life can quietly fall away from view.

Relational and ecological ways of knowing invite us to pause here — to consider that what we are seeing may not be a problem to fix, but a response to conditions.

Calm, compliance, and rhythm

In many systems, regulation becomes equated with calm. Children are rewarded for stillness, quietness, and emotional containment. Movement, intensity, refusal, or overwhelm are more likely to be corrected than understood.

Yet living systems do not remain calm at all times.

They move through cycles — activation and rest, expansion and contraction, expression and retreat. Expecting children to maintain constant composure, particularly in environments that are fast, demanding, or overstimulating, often asks them to work against their own rhythms.

From this perspective, what is called “dysregulation” may be less about failure, and more about mismatch.

An ecological lens on distress

Ecology teaches us that systems struggle when demands outweigh capacity — when there is too much pressure, too little recovery, or not enough space to adapt.

Children’s distress can often be understood in similar ways.

Anxiety, agitation, withdrawal, shutdown, intensity — these responses may be signals that something in the child’s environment is asking for attention. They carry information about safety, agency, connection, and pace.

Listening through an ecological lens does not deny difficulty or minimise suffering. It simply widens the frame, allowing distress to be seen as meaningful rather than defective.

Reimagining the role of therapy

When therapy is asked to make children easier, quieter, or more compliant, it can unintentionally mirror the pressures children are already carrying.

This work moves differently.

Rather than focusing on how a child should change, attention is given to relationship, context, and conditions. To how power is held. To whose pace is being followed. To what the child’s responses may be protecting.

The aim is not to remove challenge or discomfort, but to reduce harm — and to create spaces where children do not have to work so hard to be acceptable.

In these spaces, distress is not treated as the problem. It becomes part of a larger story about what is needed for care, dignity, and belonging to return.