I got a few suggestions related to age on my Kinopio page during my presentation. This led me to look into CBT for young people.
I wanted to find out if children have a more difficult time engaging in therapy than adults. I made the assumption that they do, as they may not understand the concept of therapy and therefore might be likely to react negatively in fear and confusion. After doing some research to determine whether or not my thoughts were true, I discovered that there are cases of reluctance among kids to attend therapy sessions. This can be due to various reasons. Some examples, taken from PsychCentral, highlight that “Many children are afraid or nervous to go to therapy, especially if they have the belief that they are in trouble or because they are ‘bad,’". Also, young kids could “mistakenly believe that they are going to a medical doctor’s office and may get a shot or other uncomfortable procedures done.”
I'd like to act on this issue and find an alternative way, through a game, that would potentially make it easier to children to participate in therapy. Having a digital platform that the child could access from home or a familiar location, as opposed to being in a clinical space, may provide a more positive therapy experience for them.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/when-your-child-doesnt-want-to-go-to-therapy-but-needs-to#1
I was also influenced to choose this age group by the idea that the sooner a potential issue is addressed, such as mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, the less likely it will be for that child to develop them more severely at an older age.
“Most potential mental health problems will not become mental health problems if we respond to them early.” - InBrief: Early Childhood Mental Health
Preventing the situation earlier on is much better than facing it later down the line. This is why I believe it would be good to provide more support for younger people to access therapy.
https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/deep-dives/mental-health/
From these studies, CBT has been proven to work on children ranging from ages between 3-15. I think this is still quite a broad audience and would like to target a more condensed group. This is due to there being quite a significant gap between the youngest and eldest age. I think looking into older children, who are more capable of understanding and executing simple tasks, would be a more effective approach as they are slightly more cognitively developed. For this reason, I am choosing the age range of 8-15.
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/cbt-for-kids#how-it-works-for-kids