Family Counseling in the Schools. Family Counseling in the Schools. Family interventions by school counselors can address a child's misbehavior, making costly special placements unnecessary. Furthermore, school counselors are in a unique position to appreciate the effectiveness of family counseling approaches with children.
School children react to changes and stress within the family unit in which they belong.
Using this family systems approach, school counselors can apply family counseling to solve a child's problems and assist the child's family in finding solutions to problems from a social context. After eliminating specific school causes for presenting problems, school counselors should consider etiology that is based out of school. According to systems theory, when a child's problem persists, it is usually connected to the extended social unit or family. Therefore, it is best to solve the problem by including the school as well as the family in formulating a solution. This perspective suggests that a student's negative behavior is connected to how the parents and other family members respond when the problem behavior occurs.