Special Ethical Considerations when Working with Kids & Teens: Complications to Boundaries & Confidentiality

Working with children and teens brings ethical and legal complexities that are not always addressed clearly in professional codes of ethics. Clinicians are still responsible for protecting confidentiality, supporting autonomy, minimizing harm, and acting in the client’s best interest, but those responsibilities become more complicated when the client is a minor, parents or caregivers have legal authority, and family systems, schools, courts, or child protection systems are also involved.

This course helps behavioral health professionals think more carefully about the ethical questions that arise when serving child and adolescent clients. Rather than offering simple rules for every situation, the course provides a practical framework for evaluating competing responsibilities, clarifying the role of the clinician, and making decisions that can be explained, documented, and defended.

Kathryn Krase, Ph.D., J.D., M.S.W., Principal Consultant with Krase Consulting and founder of Making the Tough Call, brings a distinctive combination of social work, legal, policy, and child welfare expertise to this topic. As an attorney and social worker who helps mental health, healthcare, and educational professionals understand their ethical and legal obligations, Dr. Krase is well suited to guide clinicians through the complicated realities of confidentiality, consent, boundaries, mandated reporting, and professional decision-making when working with minors and their families.

Dr. Krase grounds the training in a practical ethical framework designed to help you navigate the competing responsibilities of working with children, teens, and their caregivers. Rather than relying on simple rules, you will learn a structured approach to ethical uncertainty—slowing down to evaluate the child’s developing autonomy, potential harms, and state-specific legal requirements. You will leave equipped to make professional decisions that are legally sound, clinically thoughtful, and properly documented.

Confidentiality and boundaries become especially complex when a young client’s therapeutic needs collide with parental authority, court involvement, family conflict, or the nuances of telehealth and digital communication. To navigate these pressures, you will explore how to establish clear role expectations, manage informed consent, and communicate effectively with both minors and caregivers. Ultimately, this course empowers you to protect your young client's trust and therapeutic progress while confidently handling the practical and legal realities of family involvement.

Key Takeaways

• Use a structured ethical framework: Strengthen your ability to evaluate competing responsibilities when working with child and adolescent clients, parents, caregivers, and other involved systems.
• Clarify confidentiality with minors: Better understand how confidentiality applies to child clients and why developmentally appropriate conversations about privacy and disclosure are essential.
• Navigate parent and caregiver involvement: Set clearer expectations with parents and caregivers while keeping the child client’s therapeutic needs at the center of the work.
• Respond to complex disclosures: Approach sensitive information from minors with greater attention to clinical context, legal requirements, consultation, and documentation.
• Strengthen professional boundaries: Examine how role clarity, technology, physical contact, social media, gifts, and overlapping relationships can affect ethical practice with children and teens.

Why This Course?

• Clinically relevant ethics training: Focus on the kinds of dilemmas clinicians actually encounter when working with children, teens, parents, caregivers, courts, schools, and child-serving systems.
• Practical decision-making support: Move beyond overly simple answers by learning how to evaluate options, consult appropriately, and document the reasoning behind difficult decisions.
• Useful across practice settings: Apply the content in private practice, schools, agencies, community mental health, child welfare-adjacent settings, telehealth, and other behavioral health environments.
• Focused on the child client: Maintain a clear therapeutic role while recognizing the legal and practical realities of parent and caregiver involvement.

Learning Objectives

• Describe the ethical and legal responsibility of professionals to maintain appropriate professional boundaries with child clients.
• Describe the ethical and legal responsibility of professionals to maintain appropriate professional boundaries with parents/caretakers of child clients.
• Explain the limits of confidentiality as they relate to the clinical relationship with child clients.
• Apply a framework for informed consent with child clients appropriate to the developmental realities of the individual client.
• Apply a framework for informed consent with the parent(s)/caretaker(s) of child clients appropriate to the realities of that client’s situation.

Whether you work with children and teens in private practice, schools, community mental health, agencies, telehealth, or other clinical settings, this program offers a thoughtful and practical approach to ethical decision-making with minors and their families. Join Dr. Kathryn Krase for a clinically grounded ethics program designed to help behavioral health professionals navigate boundaries, confidentiality, consent, and caregiver involvement with greater clarity and care.