Rational-Emotive Consultation in Applied Settings

John F. Mclnerney Cape May, New Jersey

Consultation with adults, whether parents, teachers, or other child-care workers, about the emotional and behavioral problems experienced by children is a significant form of mental health service delivery in applied settings. Whether consultation occurs in the clinic, school, or private office, it represents a major source of assistance to adults in their attempt to respond to the identified difficulties of children and adolescents. Consultation is an indirect form of treatment for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children. The potential effectiveness and efficiency of this approach, when compared to the magnitude of the problems experienced by children and the scarcity of resources for sometimes less efficient individual treatment, provides more than adequate justification for special professional attention to consultation as a potentially powerful resource. Considering that young children and some adolescents are occasionally unable or often unwilling to participate in individual treatment, the case for consultation as a major resource for addressing childhood and adolescent problems is further strengthened.

Consultation often involves working with parents. In a generic sense, many forms of family therapy, parent counseling, and parent training groups are a response to parents' perception of a need to learn how to better help their child with emotional and behavioral problems. Parent education as well as much of what occurs in parent-teacher conferences in schools are indirect attempts to intervene in the problems experienced by children and adolescents. Whether consultation is informal or structured, the consultant in effect attempts to reeducate or persuade the consultee to change their thoughts, feelings, and actions regarding the child or adolescent. This goal of changing feelings and behavior in response to the child and his or her problems is seen as the means whereby

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