Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

Send us Fan Mail Some children aren’t told to choose between parents, yet they live as if they must. When co-parenting breaks down into hostility, chronic substance misuse, and frightening volatility, the child can end up carrying what the adults cannot hold and their behavior becomes the loudest signal in the room. We tell the story of a girl who grows up surrounded by shouting, threats, police c...

Send us Fan Mail Some clinical stories don’t stay with you because of the details, but because of the unfairness and the feeling of watching a slow-motion collision that nobody can quite stop. We walk through a case of a fourteen-year-old boy whose life is shaped by a toxic mix: adolescence, drug and alcohol use, escalating volatility, school exclusions, and a family system organized around sustai...

Send us Fan Mail The most baffling relational pattern I see in high-risk adolescents is also one of the most human: things start to go well, and that’s exactly when they pull the plug. A young person shows up, connects, even seems to trust us and then suddenly becomes withdrawn, provocative, or disappears. From the outside it can look like non-compliance or “failed to engage.” From the inside, it...

Send us Fan Mail A teenager walks into my room and her body tells a story before she says a word: painfully thin, tense, avoiding eye contact, braced for danger. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I share a carefully told clinical case from my sexualization trauma series that shows how trauma can hide in plain sight as selective mutism, social anxiety, and rigid control aroun...

Send us Fan Mail A child’s anger can fill the whole room. It can make families feel trapped in the same fight every day, and it can leave teachers and caregivers convinced the child is simply oppositional. I take a different view: rage is often protection. When we treat anger as the problem, we risk missing the fear, shame, hurt, and overwhelm that are driving the behavior in the first place. I wa...

Send us Fan Mail Most families don’t come to therapy because they’re “doing it wrong.” They come because something has started to hurt, spiral, or break down, and they need a way to understand what’s happening without being blamed. I’m Kim Lee,  a Child & adolescent psychotherapist, and this is the start of From Inside the Consulting Room, a series designed to be both a window into clinical wo...

Send us Fan Mail The kids who shout get noticed. The kids who stay polite, helpful, and “mature for their age” can disappear in plain sight and that’s where things can quietly go wrong. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I’m opening a new series by focusing on the child who seems fine but isn’t. I unpack why “no trouble at all” can be a warning sign, not a reassurance. Throug...

Send us Fan Mail Screens can look like the problem when a child won’t put the device down, but we’ve found that the real story usually lives underneath the behavior. We talk through a calmer, more practical way to respond when screen time turns into stand-offs, shutdowns, or daily battles, especially for parents who feel stuck between “I need limits” and “I don’t want constant conflict.”  We explo...

Send us Fan Mail Your child is sitting right next to you, but somehow they feel miles away. When screens take over, it’s tempting to clamp down with tighter rules, stricter limits, and a last-resort device ban. We take a different path: we look at what the screen is doing for your child and what it might be helping them avoid, manage, or soothe. Because the hardest truth for many parents is also t...

Send us Fan Mail Turning off a screen can look like a simple request, but for many kids it lands like a shock to the nervous system. We unpack why that switch from “fine” to furious happens so fast, and why it often has less to do with defiance and more to do with dopamine design. When apps and platforms are built on unpredictability, reward, and repetition, children get pulled into an anticipatio...

Send us Fan Mail A child can be bright, polite, and high-functioning while feeling unreal inside. That quiet distance is easy to miss, especially when there are no obvious behavior problems, but it can shape everything from mood swings to shutdown to the familiar “I don’t care.” We explore what I call the disconnected self: not the absence of self, but a self that has learned to divide, adapt, or...

Send us Fan Mail Childhood doesn’t only happen in playgrounds anymore. For a lot of kids, friendship, status, comfort, and belonging now live in group chats, messages, and gaming communities, and that means a child’s screen can represent something much bigger than “entertainment.” We talk through what changes when a young person’s social world moves into spaces adults can’t easily see. Online safe...

Send us Fan Mail Screen time advice can make you feel like the solution is simple: count the minutes, set the limit, take the device away. But if you’ve tried that and nothing truly changes, you’re not failing, you’re probably trying to solve the wrong problem. We share a different way to think about children, screens, and digital wellbeing that starts with one grounding idea: a screen is never ju...

Send us Fan Mail The screen time conversation keeps getting reduced to a single number, and that’s exactly where parents get stuck. Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, opens this series with a blunt critique of the UK government-commissioned iStag report and why its conclusions feel far more confident in public than the underlying evidence allows. We talk about rushed research timelin...

Send us Fan Mail The scariest part of adolescent criminality is how fast a family can start talking like the future is already decided. When a teen gets suspended again, fights again, or ends up on the radar for drugs or threats, “lost cause” can start to sound like a fact instead of a feeling. I want to slow that moment down and look at what it’s really made of: fear, anger, shame, emotional negl...

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Send us Fan Mail A child can be fed, spoken to, and provided for, yet still feel unreachable inside. When that happens, silence doesn’t always stay silent, it turns into action. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I take you into the psychology of adolescent criminality through the lens of attachment loss and acting out behaviors that can look like “bad choices” from the outsi...

Send us Fan Mail Teenagers don’t wake up and choose chaos the way adults imagine it. They can tell you the rules, list the consequences, and even explain the risk, then still do the thing that blows everything up five minutes later. I unpack why that happens through the lens of adolescent brain development, where the reward system and emotional intensity surge ahead while the prefrontal cortex ski...

Send us Fan Mail The worst part often isn’t the offense. It’s the moment the phone rings and a parent hears, “Your child has been involved in an incident,” and everything they thought they knew starts to slide. I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and I want to take adolescent criminality out of the headline frame and put it back where it belongs: inside real families, real feeling...

Send us Fan Mail A single word can change a child’s life: criminal. Once that label lands, adults often stop asking “what led to this?” and start deciding “what should happen to them?” I’m Kim Lee, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and this series begins by slowing the conversation down so we can understand what adolescent criminality actually means and why that definition matters before we...

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Send us Fan Mail He walks in without ringing the bell, drops into the chair, and hits me with: “Can we just get this over with?” From that first moment, I’m working with an “exploding adolescent,” a fifteen-year-old whose home life is full of conflict, whose school day can flip from calm to chaos in seconds, and whose anger seems to arrive without warning.  I slow the story down and look beneath t...

Send us Fan Mail A child who cries “too easily” can leave adults feeling helpless, impatient, or quietly alarmed. We sit with that discomfort and tell the story of Amelia, a nine-year-old who arrives at her first assessment already in tears. The crying isn’t dramatic, it’s steady, like feelings that have been building with nowhere safe to go. From school transitions to small corrections, everythin...

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