In the first chapter of, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook Child Psychiatrist's Notebook--What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing, the author does a great job setting up the complexities of working with youth and families that are in poverty. As the author struggles with coming up with a diagnosis for Tina after their first meeting he has a supervisor say to him, "spend some time getting to know her not her symptoms." This advice stood out to me as I feel there is a typical demand in the field to diagnose and fix without remembering the best results that will come out of a genuine connection with clients. Without having the connection with Tina that the psychiatrist did he would have missed some key ecological influences that are affecting her behavior.
The work done with Tina also brought up the importance of relationships with the entire family when working with youth especially those who are not teenagers. It was the little things the author did like making sure the whole family was settled before meeting with Tina and not assuming that mom's lateness was resistance to the work being done.
In addition to this, I thought the author brought up good points about boundaries with clients and what it means to feel a need to assist clients in ways that are out of the bounds of your agency's policy. This is something I consistently struggle with and would love to discuss more in this class.