The overall goal of behavioral interventions is to help clients develop adaptive and supportive behaviors to multifaceted situations. Developing adaptive behavior often means helping the client weaken or eliminate behaviors that work against the desired outcome, e.g. eating snacks when you wish to lose weight. A significant part of this process involves teaching the client. Systemic interventions are premised upon the assumption that one's environment elicits and supports the individual's dysfunctional cognitive, behavioral and affective responses. The go goal of systemic interventions is to change the individual's social environment or system, thus changing the patterns of interrelationship that elicited or supported these responses.
Children pose special issues in the selection of counseling interventions for several reasons.
They have little power or control over their environment, or may lack the cognitive or affective development to respond to some interventions. For this reason, a systemic view which involves significant adults in their world often is the most effective approach to intervention selection. Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. Factor analysis of psychoanalytic, nondirective, and Adlerian therapeutic relationships. Converging themes in psychotherapy.