Job Opportunities in Child and Adolescent Psychology

People who choose to study child and teen psychology walk into a field with a surprising spread of options. The work shows up in solo practice, in small teams, in large organizations, and at every rung of the administrative ladder. Most of the public pictures a counselor sitting across from a troubled kid, and that counselor is real, but it's only the tip of what the training can lead to. Licensed therapists often land in managed care or in government programs, handling both inpatient and outpatient cases. Hospitals bring them on for consultations. So do schools.

Board certification isn't a wall that keeps everyone else out. Someone with a grounding in child psychology who hasn't yet cleared certification can still find steady work as support staff. Juvenile courts hire them. So do rehab facilities and group homes tied to court-ordered youth programs.

Research is another door entirely. The data on childhood mental illness keeps piling up, and every proposed treatment has to be tested before anyone trusts it. That might mean running clinical trials, or it might mean combing through the studies that already exist and making sense of them. Most of this happens inside universities.

Once findings get written up for professional journals, the manuscripts have to be edited by people who actually understand the terminology, which is its own niche. Head toward policy instead and the same background opens doors as an advocate or a lobbyist arguing for children's mental health laws and regulations. On the ground, community organizers push to prevent and treat the ugly stuff: drug and alcohol abuse, child sexual abuse, bullying, suicide, teen pregnancy, depression.

The outlook is fairly bright, as these things go. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has reported real shortages across the mental health professions, and the gaps run deepest in rural parts of the country. More recent figures suggest the demand for these skills isn't going to shrink anytime soon.

The settings are as varied as the jobs. You could be working one on one or inside a cooperative team. You could be driving out to field assignments or parked in an office cubicle. Rural or urban. Public or private. Well paid or barely paid.