Stealing in children and teenagers

Parents describe finding it rather than being told. Money missing from a purse, a small amount at a time, over weeks. A classmate's pencil case at the bottom of a school bag. Something from a shop that nobody paid for, hidden badly enough that it was clearly going to be found.

What bewilders most parents is that there was no need. Pocket money sits untouched in a drawer. The thing taken was not wanted, and sometimes it is given away within the day. With teenagers it is described differently: a group, a shop, a dare, and a sequence nobody involved can afterwards explain.

And parents describe their own fear, which is bigger than the event. Not what has happened, but what does this mean about my child — and, in households where news travels, what it will mean if anybody finds out.

Recognising your child in a paragraph on a website is not the same as knowing what is going on. This page describes; it does not assess anyone, and there is nothing here for you to score against.

A young child taking something is not, by itself, a clinical matter. Small children take what they want because the idea that it belongs to somebody else is still being learned.

What a clinician pays attention to is age, pattern and what else is happening. What is expected at four is not what is expected at fourteen. A pattern over months rather than one incident. And, most usefully, what has changed around the child — a move, a new baby, a bereavement, a separation, something at school, or money being demanded from them by somebody older.

One thing said plainly, because parents arrive braced for it. This is not a verdict on your parenting. Taking things is a behaviour rather than a diagnosis, it sits on top of different things in different children, and which one it is changes everything that follows.

Only a qualified clinician can tell you what is going on — a website cannot.

What PHC is, and is not. PHC is a psychology practice. We are not a legal service and not a disciplinary one — we do not investigate and we do not establish who did what, and anything happening at a school or with the police runs on its own track. What we can do is assess a child, describe what is going on, and work with the family.

1. An initial sessionWe ask what has happened, how often, over how long, and what has changed around the child. Parents are part of that conversation. Nothing is administered before it.
2. The assessment that is actually indicatedWhere a child is struggling at school and this has arrived alongside it, a learning and achievement assessment is often what explains a year of behaviour nobody could account for. Which assessment, if any, follows the initial session — your child will not be given tests they do not need.
3. A psychologist matched to what the assessment foundAssignment is based on speciality, the presenting needs and clinical fit — and for a child, on age as much as anything else.
4. Therapy, reviewed as it goesMost of the work with a younger child is done through play therapy and behavioural approaches rather than through talking, with the parents closely involved. Where the pattern belongs to the household rather than to one child, family psychotherapy may be the unit of work instead. Sessions are 50 minutes, in clinic at our DHA clinic or in PECHS, or online.

• Parenting difficulties
• Persistent lying
• ADHD
• Learning and achievement assessment
• Family therapy