The Child Who
Will Not Talk
What to do when a child can’t - or won’t - engage in the therapy room.
There is probably one child you thought of when you read that title.
They’ve been coming for weeks. They’re polite, or silent, or under the desk, and they give you nothing. You’ve tried being warmer. You’ve tried going slower. And somewhere in the last month you’ve had the thought that maybe this is you.
It isn’t you. In forty-five minutes we’ll show you what it actually is.
FREE SESSION - Save your place
Wednesday 23 September 2026 · 5:00pm AEST · 45 min
Free. The recording comes to you either way.
Can’t make the time? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.
Most clinicians who come to us are not struggling generally. They’re competent at a great deal of their work and carrying one case that makes them doubt the rest of it.
The pattern is nearly always the same. Your training gave you models built on adults and validated with adults, and those models quietly assume three things about the person opposite you: that they’re verbal, that they’re voluntary, and that they can observe and report on their own inner life.
A great many children are none of those three. So when the model doesn’t fit, most of us do the adult thing more slowly, more warmly, in a smaller chair - and when that doesn’t work either, we conclude that the child isn’t ready, or that we’re not very good with children.
Neither is true. Child work has its own methods, its own sequence and its own evidence base and a great many of us finished training without being handed them. That’s a gap in the pathway, not a deficit in you.
Four children. One word.
We open with four children you’ll recognise. In the referral notes, all four are described with the same word and that word is the reason nobody can reach them.
Leo, 6
Comes in, walks past the sand tray, gets under your desk. Stays there. Not crying. Just gone.
Ivy, 9
Sits beautifully. Makes eye contact. “I dunno.” Shrug. Fifty minutes of complete cooperation and nothing at all.
Callum, 14
Sent by his head of year, walked down at lunchtime. Arms folded, hood up. “This is stupid, no offence.”
Ada, 8
Delightful. Talks about her guinea pig for fifty minutes. “How did that feel?” - “Fine.” Back to the guinea pig.
All four file notes say the same thing.
“Resistant.”
Except “resistant” is not a formulation - it’s what we write when we don’t have one. Each of those four children is closing down for a completely different reason, and each one needs a completely different first session. We’ll show you how to tell which is which, in the first ten minutes, without a questionnaire.
What you’ll leave with
Not a topic overview. A working method you can use in your next session.
Who this is for
This will suit you if…
- You work with children or adolescents - as a psychologist, counsellor, social worker, mental health OT, speech pathologist or school psychologist.
- You have a case right now that you can’t reach, and you’ve started to wonder whether that’s about you.
- You’ve collected a reasonable number of techniques and want a principled way of choosing between them.
- You’d rather understand a method than be handed a worksheet.
- You’re at any stage but it’s written for clinicians who are already competent and have one case that makes them doubt it.
It isn’t
- An introduction to child development for clinicians new to the population.
- A play therapy qualification - that’s a separate pathway with its own credentials.
- A sales presentation with a lesson attached. The teaching is the whole forty minutes.
Two supervisors, thinking out loud
You’ll hear from both of us throughout and if we disagree in front of you, that’s not a mishap. It’s how we actually work.
Dr Anna Cohen
Area of Practice Endorsement in Clinical Psychology and board-approved clinical supervisor, with close to three decades of clinical practice with children and families, and author of five parenting books. Co-founder of Kids & Co Clinical Psychology, Heads & Tails Psychology and Counselling, and the Clinical Psychology Resource Centre.
Isabel Fraser
Board-approved clinical supervisor and co-founder of the Clinical Psychology Resource Centre, where she co-designs and co-presents the lectures, masterclasses and certification pathway. Much of her working week is spent supervising clinicians who work with children, adolescents and families - which means she sees, over and over, the cases that leave capable people stuck.
There’s no catch worth warning you about.
It’s free, and the teaching is the whole forty minutes - nothing is held back for a paid version. We’ll mention what else we run at the end, once, and you’re welcome to ignore it.
Information isn’t scarce any more. Everything we teach has been written down somewhere, and you could go and find most of it this evening if you had a spare six months. What’s scarce is having somebody experienced look at your case and tell you where the child is stuck. So we give the information away because the information was never the valuable part.
Save your place
Wednesday 23 September 2026 · 5:00pm AEST · 45 minutes
Free. Two minutes. The recording comes to you either way.
Save my place - it’s freeYou’ll also start receiving The Monthly Vignette - one de-identified case a month, free, unsubscribe in one click.
Good to know
Yes, with no payment details taken at any point. We run it because we’d rather you saw how we teach than took our word for it.
Yes. Everyone who registers gets the recording and the slides, whether they attend or not. We chose 5pm because it sits after most people’s last client, but a good number watch it later at their desk instead.
You’ll receive a record of attendance. CPD requirements differ between professions, so please confirm how this counts with your own registration body or professional association.
Yes - the questions box is open from the start and we set aside time at the end. We’d rather answer two questions properly than six badly, so bring the one you’re most stuck on.
No. Play therapy is a modality with its own training pathways and credentials, and nothing here certifies you in it. What we teach is an integrative approach that draws on expressive media - including play - as one family of methods among several, chosen by formulation and sequenced deliberately.
You’ll get the session details and the recording, and - unless you untick the box - The Monthly Vignette, which is one de-identified case a month. One click unsubscribes you from everything. We don’t share your details with anyone.
No. It assumes you work with children but not that you’ve trained in any particular modality, and one of the questions we always answer is specifically for early-career clinicians who find this a lot to take in at once.
